Ekiga (formerly called GnomeMeeting) is a VoIP and video conferencing application for GNOME and Windows.
It is distributed as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It was the default VoIP client in Ubuntu until October 2009, when it was replaced by Empathy.
Ekiga supports both the SIP and H.323 (based on OPAL) protocols and is fully interoperable with any other SIP compliant application and with Microsoft NetMeeting. It supports many high-quality audio and video codecs.
Key features include:
Call forwarding on busy, no answer, always; call transfer; call hold; DTMF support; basic instant messaging; text chat; register with several registrars and gatekeepers simultaneously; ability to use an outbound proxy or a gateway; message waiting indications; audio and video.
Empathy is a messaging program which supports text, voice, and video chat and file transfers over many different protocols. You can tell it about your accounts on all those services and do all your chatting within one application.
Empathy uses Telepathy for protocol support and has a user interface based on Gossip. Empathy is the default chat client in current versions of GNOME, making it easier for other GNOME applications to integrate collaboration functionality using Telepathy.
Key features include:
- Multi-protocol: Google Talk (Jabber/XMPP), MSN, IRC, Salut, AIM, Facebook, Yahoo!, Gadu Gadu, Groupwise, ICQ and QQ. Supports all protocols supported by Pidgin.
- File transfer for XMPP, and local networks.
- Voice and video call using SIP, XMPP and Google Talk.
Some IRC support.
- Sharing and viewing location information.
- Private and group chat (with smileys and spell checking).
- Conversation logging.
- Automatic away and extended away presence.
- Automatic reconnection using Network Manager.
Blink is an SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) client for Mac that can be used with any SIP provider or on its own as a fully-featured SIP service.
Key features include:
- Support for multiple SIP accounts
- Detection of IP address changes
- SIP account sign-up at http://sip2sip.info
- Bonjour discovery mechanism
- Integration with MacOSX Address Book (MacOSX)
- Integration with Google contacts (Windows and Linux)
- Answering machine
- Displays RTP end-point information
- Automatically play and resume iTunes
- Multiple parallel calls
- Silent mode (do not ring on incoming call)
- Mute microphone
- Audio recording
And more. See the full feature list here.
The Sakai CLE is a free collaboration and learning environment platform for use in teaching, research and collaborative scholarship; developed by Sakai Foundation contributors.
Sakai CLE includes many of the features common to course management systems or VLEs, including document distribution, a gradebook, discussion, live chat, assignment uploads, and online testing.
It also features a personal workspace with a range of user oriented tools such as: Message Of The Day; Generic collaboration tools; Announcements; a Drop Box which allows instructors and students to share documents within a private folder for each participant; an email archive; shared resources folders; a chat room; forums; a message center to communicate using internal course mail; news / RSS feeds; and a user poll tool.
There is also a facility to upload and share slide presentations; a profile / roster function; full repository search; and a schedule which allows instructors or site organizers to post items in a calendar format.
For an in-depth look at the Sakai CLE and the broader Sakai Project check out the Official Sakai Guide Book and the newly published book Sakai: Free as in Freedom.
Projectory is an open source, platform-independent, web-enabled project management tool designed to track software projects through all phases of development.
It’s key features are as follows:
Easy to install
Because it is based on open source technologies and is platform-agnostic right out of the box, it is equally at home in Windows, *NIX, or Mac OS X environments.
Easy to use
Users log in with their real names, and are immediately taken to a task-pad view that shows all of the functions and reports that they are permitted to access. Creating work entries, managing teams, creating projects, and viewing reports are all quick and easy. A user is never more than two clicks away from any functionality.
Efficient tracking
By providing up-to-date information on how much actual effort is being expended across activities, projects, and teams, Projectory lets you measure the reality of your development costs against the “best case scenarios” provided by project planning software. This means that you can react to change rapidly– saving time, effort, and maybe even your job.
Flexible workflow
Use the default user group settings to manage access to functionality, or define new user groups to match the roles and responsibilities in your software development organization.
Stackbox CMS is an open source content management system aimed to end the “backend” editing paradigm for good. All content editing is done directly in-place and on-page through drag-and-drop, JavaScript and AJAX methods.
This CMS is still in development but the bleeding edge releases are available for download and testing. The concept of eliminating the “backend” is particularly interesting for users looking for the most immediate and simple content publishing solutions.
The introductory video below covers the main features of Stackbox CMS. It’s worth taking a look.
Stackbox CMS Introduction from Vance Lucas on Vimeo.
Alloy is a Hierarchical-Model-View-Controller web application framework for producing web applications with PHP 5.3 and above.
The key features of this development framework include:
- Practical Object-Oriented design that isn’t overly strict, needlessly complex, or focused on trying to be like Java.
- Representational State Transfer (REST) is a core part of the Alloy module architecture, and is built-in and accounted for from the beginning, not bolted-on as an afterthought.
- Coding simplicity and flexibility. Code flow is easier to follow, understand, and manipulate.
- No configuration or setup: Works out-of-the-box with no initial configuration or command-line setup required. Drag and drop files or upload directly to your web server.
- Serve your app from a root domain, subdomain, or a subfolder as many levels deeps as you like.
MythTV is a free and open source home entertainment application with a simplified “10-foot user interface” design for the living-room TV, and turns a computer with the necessary hardware into a network streaming digital video recorder, a digital multimedia home entertainment system, or Home Theater Personal Computer.
It is an excellent free alternative to Windows Media Center or TiVO. Key software features include:
- Pause, skip, and rewind live TV shows.
- Completely automatic commercial detection and optional skipping.
- Intelligently schedules recordings to avoid conflicts.
- Interfaces with TV listing sources such as XMLTV or PSIP.
- A backend server and frontend client architecture, allowing multiple frontend client machines to be remotely served content from one or more backend servers. A single computer can perform as both the frontend client and the backend server.
- Plays recordings at an accelerated or decelerated rate, adjusting the audio pitch as necessary.
- Controls a set top box using an infrared remote (IR blaster), or firewire.
MythTV main menu
BRL-CAD is a powerful cross-platform Open Source combinatorial Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solid modeling system that includes interactive 3D solid geometry editing, high-performance ray-tracing support for rendering and geometric analysis, network-distributed framebuffer support, image and signal-processing tools, path-tracing and photon mapping support for realistic image synthesis, a system performance analysis benchmark suite, an embedded scripting interface, and libraries for robust high-performance geometric representation and analysis.
The BRL-CAD libraries are designed primarily for the geometric modeler who also wants to play with software and design custom tools.
Each library is designed for a specific purpose: creating, editing, and raytracing geometry, and image handling. The application side of BRL-CAD also offers a number of tools and utilities that are primarily concerned with geometric conversion, interrogation, image format conversion, and command-line-oriented image manipulation.
Boinc is open source software for volunteer and grid computing. Once installed it can use the unused CPU and GPU cycles on a computer to do scientific computing.
It lets you donate your idle computer time to science projects like SETI@home, Climateprediction.net, Rosetta@home, World Community Grid, and many others.
Upon launching the application you will be prompted to choose projects to support. You will also be able to regulate the percentage of time that BOINC is allowed to compute in the application’s comprehensive options panel.