Minh’s Notes

Human-readable chicken scratch

Minh Nguyễn
July 105+5 , 2005
Computing
#805

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Perfectly legal

I am proud to say that, for the past several years, the computers at my house have no software illegally installed on them. I’m not necessarily proud of that fact for moral/ethical/legal/financial reasons, though. In recent years, the open source movement has given us so much good software to own and use that there’s no need to go through the trouble of illegally obtaining software.

And I’m not just talking about Firefox, for once.

I know many people who use pirated copies of things like Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Flash. In the past, when you talked about open-source imaging software, you were talking about the ugly monstrosity that is the GIMP. But these days, there are also alternatives that are – shockingly – pleasant and easy to use. I’m talking about Paint.NET.

Hey, I’m actually plugging a program using Microsoft technologies! What blasphemy! But seriously: anti-Micro$oft sentiments aside, it’s good software. Try it out sometime.

Thanks to Neil Turner for the scoop on Paint.NET.


Comments

  1. Gah! The gimp! it pains the astetically minded so. Yet thousands use it. I'm still waiting for adobe to catch up to corel in the aspect of brush bleging though, photoshop just makes it look so ugly when you try to smudge and blend, painter does it automatically and with a very good outcome, saving hours of work, but then again painter isn't nearly as powerfull as photoshop in the rendering department. I shall have to download this and see how it stacks up.