Software for Starving Students

The name of the software distribution is probably a little bit out of line but the purpose is not. The goal is to reduce software costs for students to provide them with free alternatives to commercial programs. While designed with students in mind, it should be attractive for non-students as well.

The website offers a version of the distribution for Windows computers and for Macs. You may download it using the preferred method bittorrent to ease the load on the server and reduce bandwidth costs or via http downloads.

All the software products are either open source or freeware that have been added with permission of the author of the product to the collection.

You may  know most of the programs already but it is still worth checking out for the occasional program that one does not know. Take a look at the list of software that has been included so far. Each contains a link to the developers homepage which is an alternative method to download them.

It is kinda strange that some games have made it into the final distribution, not sure about the motivation to add them to the package. It is nevertheless a great compilation, I found some tools that I have not heard about (yet) and which I will review once I find the time to do so.

Update: Software for starving students is now available a the Western Oklahoma State college website. The big issue here is that direct downloads do not work anymore for most of the applications, and that you have to visit the linked developer or program website to download the software to your computer.

While that is one or two additional steps before you can run or install the software on your computer system, it is usually still worth it as you find great free applications listed here that do not cost you a dime. Examples? Paint.net, Putty, WinSCP, Filezilla, Firefox, or the VLC media player.

Update 2: The website redirects you to the start page of the University now citing that the collection is out of date and requires updating. One alternative that you can check out is the portable apps application that provides you with a great collection of free software that you can use for all purposes.

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