Free alternatives to Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and more...

I was asked today to make a choice between Adobe Illustrator (high end art illustration program for creating custom graphics) and its competitor Corel Draw. Both are great programs and in the hands of a 'digital artist' they produce excellent results for logos, advertising layout, custom clip-art, etc. The problem is that you do need to be quite experienced in the programs to get the most out of them and they cost between $400-500.

Fortunately, there are many talented programs around the globe who work on free software that anyone can download use. This type of software is called "Open Source". A large movement (I guess we call it that) has been in place since almost the beginning of computers that wants to keep powerful software free and available to anyone. Much of the software is quite good and here is a link to a site that I found which offers free alternatives to Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Flash, Microsoft FrontPage and more.

One caution; free open source software can be buggy (potentially have or cause problems) and it comes with no formal support. Support is offered in the way of public forums on the Internet only. Many of these programs work quite well, but you need to have a pioneering attitude when trying this type of software solution. Some of the best software available today is a result of this type of software...Mozilla Firefox and Open Office come to mind first.

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