OpenSource Open Mind?

Everytime I sit down to "do a little research" on a subject, I am NEVER disappointed in the wealth of information I can find online. How did I EVER get anything done before the internet? There's always video, free information, quite possibly a free piece of software that will perform the acts of majick I'm looking for or if you prefer, there's always someone willing to sell it as well. I use to think "you get what you pay for" applied to software and information, that is no longer the case. There are some incredibly talented benevolent creatures on this planet. They toll their little butts off and then just hand it over to the public, imagine that!! Luckily there's karma to take care of them :) You can also make a donation on their website or at least be sure to give credit where credit's due!! Some of my recent discoveries are:

Bootstrap from Twitter: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/index.html - Web building

jQuery: http://jquery.com/ - Scripting made (somewhat) easy

OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org/ - this is free equivalent version of Microsoft Office

GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/ - image manipulation program

Inkscape: http://inkscape.org/ - similar to Illustrator or CorelDraw

SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/ - tons of open source software to browse

Happy Surfing :)

Freeware I adore you! Open Source you scare me!

Learning something new... I think I've opened an entire can of worms this time! I spend a lot of time playing computer games. So I'm very interested in the makings of a game. I have some freeware 3D graphics software along with some that I've purchased plus a little graphics experience to use them. I now have a slew of open source holy-shit-what-am-I-suppose-to-do-with-this software. However difficult, I am still in awe at the amount of freeware, shareware, open source out there that is absolutely worthy of a price tag and I am very grateful to those kind souls. By the way, if you download something for free and there is a "donate" button on that site, you should seriously consider hitting it if you are using and enjoying the download. Play NICE and everyone gets along :) Just sayin...

So I'm at a site for complete programming beginners (that would be me!) and so far after 20 minutes of reading I'm still following along... there just might be hope. To be continued unless I get scared off and then it'll be on to another project :)