Q. What did you learn in school today?
A. That Everybody should try a little Merlot and Grass.
Every computer Operating Sytem (OS) and software has its strengths and weaknesses. I believe that when the code of computer operating system and/or software is free (meaning the source code is available) that only then can you begin to protect yourself against viruses, spyware, and maleware. If everyone has the right to view the source code there are a lot less places for the bad guys to hide.

Your choice should be based on what works best for you, not what everyone else uses. Open Source Software is always free to try. Only when people are fully informed will they able to make the best decisions regarding what OS and software they should use. Being part Hawaiian and living in Hawaii; I feel a clutural obligation to share my assets (software) with others; Free and Open Source Software allows me to do that ethically.
What does Free Software mean? To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy.

Currently, many people use proprietary software that denies users these freedoms and benefits. If we make a copy and give it to a friend, if we try to figure out how the program works, if we put a copy on more than one of our own computers in our own home, we could be caught and fined or put in jail. That’s what’s in the fine print of the license agreement you accept when using proprietary software. You bought and paid for it but you don't own it!
from: Free Software Foundation.
Be aware that all these links will take you off this web site. Save this page in a tab if you want to go back.
Content: Merlot (not da wine) Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching.
Currently Sourcefordge list 8,767 titles of Educational software available under GNU License.
Western Washington University has a nice article on "Alternative Software Options."
Many worthwhile speakers about Technology, Entertaintment and Design.
Congratulations University of Hawaii for recognizing and using Yes, it is Open Source Software!
http://www.alice.org/
 Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games.

In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation.

Alice is a gift from the Carnegie Tech and the Mellon Institute of Science better know as Carnagie Mellon

Randy Pausch of Last Lecture(Youtube) fame was also a part of this project.
http://www.blender.org/
 What would you say to a free, open-source 3D program that had almost everything you could find in those expensive professional applications that cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars? It may sound too good to be true, but Blender 3D delivers amazing power at an unbeatable price. This programs rivals 3D software produced by the leading companies Autodesk, Electric Rain, NewTek, and Strata.

Used by profesionals daily. Check out a Art Gallery made by Blender. Also used by Tufts University, Albert Cardona Postdoctoral Research FellowMolecular Cell and Developmental Biology Department UCLA, and Georgia Tech.
http://www.gimp.org/
 It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. Why spend hunders of dollars for Adobe Photoshop? Try it what do you have to loose?

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

Used at these Universites: Stanford Univeristy, Boston College, and University of Houston for digital storytelling..
http://www.inkscape.org/
 An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. They aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development. Used at these Universites: Missouri State, Oregon State University,

http://grass.itc.it/
 Commonly referred to as GRASS (No not da kine you smoke)
Geographic Resources Analysis Support System

This is a Geographic Information System (GIS) used for geospatial data management and analysis, image processing, graphics/maps production, spatial modeling, and visualization. GRASS is currently used in academic and commercial settings around the world, as well as by many governmental agencies and environmental consulting companies. GRASS is official project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

In the early 1980s the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers' Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (USA/CERL) in Champaign, Illinois, began to explore the possibilities of using Geographic Information Systems to conduct environmental research, assessments, monitoring and management of lands under the stewardship of the U. S. Department of Defense. USA/CERL hired several programmers, and began by writing a hybrid raster-vector GIS for the VAX UNIX environment.

Several universities adopted GRASS as an important training and research environment. Many conducted short-courses for the public, in addition to using GRASS in their own curricula. Examples of such leading academic users of GRASS are University of Maine, University of Arizona, Harvard, and Rutgers University.

This software was also succesfully used by the Army Corp of Engineers at Fort Shafter, although they commonly use the propriatary and expensive Arcview from ESRI.
http://www.openoffice.org/ Developed over twenty years, OpenOffice.org is a mature, reliable, product. OpenOffice.org was designed from the start as a single piece of software - not bolted together from separate software packages. Why take my word for it have a look at a compilation of the independent reviews of Open Office.

OpenOffice 2 contains all the office software you need, in one single package. You don't have to worry which version to install: one installation program provides everything. The installation also includes features which some expensive rivals do not - for example, the ability to create .pdf files when you want to guarantee what the recipient sees on their computer.

The OpenOffice.org project is primarily sponsored by Sun Microsystems, which is the primary contributor of code to the Project. Our other major corporate contributors include Novell, RedHat, RedFlag CH2000, IBM, and Google. Additonally over 450,000 people from nearly every curve of the globe have joined this Project with the idea of creating the best possible office suite that all can use. This is the essence of an "open source." community!