Free is Good

It's always nice to find useful software that's free. The open source movement has had a major influence in enabling software makers to build great apps and get them out there for people to use, usually at no charge. Free is good.

What's more unusual is to find free software from the big names, like Microsoft. A few notable exceptions have emerged from the Microsoft stable over the last few years though, such as Producer, Photostory and even Sharepoint, which have actually been quite good.

The latest cool freebie is a thing called Paint.Net, developed by a group of student programmers who did an internship at Microsoft and developed a fresh new image editing tool using Microsoft's .NET framework. Microsoft is not a big player in the image editing area, and doesn't have a significant product in that space. They've obviously given a challenge to these young programmers to develop something for image editing and the result is supposed to be amazing.

Check it out for yourself at www.getpaint.net

Good on you Microsoft. Good to see some fresh thinking, even if it did take a group of clever young hackers to do it for you.