I found [this link] today which details software, available for free, either under freeware or GPL licenses. The spirit of Open Source software is, of course, to contribute in some way - so if you find yourself with a few hours a week of spare time, maybe you can help the cause. Detailed below I’ve singled out some of the more obvious replacements. Ideal if you’re on a shoe-string, are anti-big corporation or just like the ideals of open source:

[OpenOffice] - Microsoft Office Replacement

[Dia] - Visio Replacement (A little basic and doesn’t share file types)

[Paint.NET] - A great replacement for MS Paint with more features than it’s smaller cousin. A good alternative to Photoshop if all you do is basic editing/resizing.

[Dr. DivX] - A DivX replacement encoder.

[7-Zip] - The one program you need for all your archiving needs. It doesn’t compress to .rar, but does decompress from it.

[Audacity] - Great Audio editor, and can be used for podcasting too. There is no mp3 encoder included with the program, but details are available on the website where to get one from.

[Filezilla] - A fully featured FTP client & server.

[Gimpshop] - A photoshop replacement based around the Gimp platform.

[Notepad++] - Already on a [previous post] once you use this over Notepad, there is no going back..!

[PDFCreator] - The name says it all!

[Free Extractor] - A program for creating your own self-extracting archives. Replacement for Install Shield

Hopefully you can get some use for these, and if you have any suggestions of other replacements let me know.