In a similar vein, but yet having a unique style, comes osalt.com, which stands for “Open Source as alternative.” The unequivocal mission of osalt.com is to provide easy access to open source alternatives to well-known commercial products.

The osalt.com home page lists the top 10 open source packages rated on the site and the top 10 commercial applications that people are seeking replacements for. At the time of writing, these are Microsoft Visio, Norton Ghost, Adobe Photoshop, Nero Burning ROM, Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver, AutoCAD, Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Access, Adobe Premiere Pro and ACDSee.  For visitors to osalt.com, it is these applications which are proving to be critical and which have unique and essential functionality. It would be reasonable to suggest these software items are roadblocks for people wanting to switch from Windows to Linux. Happily, this is where osalt.com comes in.

Click any of the names in the two top 10 lists to jump right to the information page on that package. Or, osalt.com also lists a broad range of software categories; click any of these for alphabetical lists of commercial packages and open source software, and then click these application names. Additionally, the four most popular commercial and open source items in the chosen category are listed.

Once an application has been chosen, osalt.com describes what it is used for and the platforms it operates on. Descriptions, and links, are then presented for open source alternates – or, conversely, if you are viewing an open source app, the site displays descriptions and links for the commercial packages it is capable of replacing. Where available, vendor news feeds are also displayed giving current information at a glance, all combining to help make intelligent and meaningful comparisons and evaluations.

Where osalt.com stand out is that its descriptions go into more depth than merely a brief overview of the package’s basic purpose. Comments also discuss file types and versioning and other issues which are specifically of interest to potential switchers who will worry about whether they can work with an existing file library, or indeed, if they can still collaborate with others without necessarily requiring they also switch to the open source option.