Vaba tarkvara

This weeks's exircise: "Kirjeldage ajaveebis enda kogemusi mõne vaba tarkvaratoote kasutamisega."

What is freeware? Freeware is a software that is available to use freely and at no extra cost. I will try to share my experiences with this typo of software.
OpenOffice. I remember my childhood, when I got a new computer, it had a lot of pre-installed software. Microsoft Office was one of it. It was a very good text editor for me , and helped me to do a lot of  stuff for school. But for some reasons, not understood by me then, it required some activation. To do that, i took me to some Microsoft page and required me to pay a considerable amount of money. Ofcource, that time I was not pay for it, so i started searching for something, that is completely free. I searched and searched, until I hit OpenOffice. It was an MS Office alternative, even though it offered a bit less functionality and had a little unusual interface. But for school purposes - creation of basic report, presentations, it was enough. Nowadays I still use it for work, but not as much. For personal stuff I use Google Docs, which is also free to use.
Gimp. Gimp is the free Photoshop. I remember, back in the days, when a lot of people used Photoshop to create cool pictures of themselves. I also wanted to try the cool software, but it also required some activation. Nowadays I do not do graphics editing that much. Gimp is the picture editor that mostly fits my needs.
Audacity. During work time, I needed to fix a couple of sounds for a game. It was unreasonable to wait for a couple of days until the sound designer would make the sound a couple of seconds shorter. So I asked a friend if he knew a sound editing software, that I could use without paying. His answer was - "use Audacity :)". So I followed his advice, and after a couple minutes the sounds were of needed length. The client was happy with them and the game itself turned out to be a big success.
These are the stories that I have so far.