With Firefox as a web browser and Thunderbird as an e-mail program, the Mozilla Foundation is one of the better-known producers of free software.

For years, OpenOffice was synonymous with a free office suite with professional functionality. The development of OpenOffice was thereby sponsored by large software companies. OPenOffice has been part of the Apache Software Foundation for several years.

In 2010, The Document Foundation was founded to guarantee the further development of the Office application independent of companies. The office suite supported by The Document Foundation is called LibreOffice and is now also very popular.

Both office suites include programs for word processing, spreadsheets, presentation and drawing and come with a database module.

Zotero is a free literature management program for collecting, managing and citing various online and offline sources. Zotero supports the editing of bibliographic information and literature lists, especially in scientific publications.

There is a plugin for Firefox as well as for various word processors.

GeoGebra is a dynamic mathematics software. GeoGebra combines geometry, algebra, tables, drawings, statistics and analysis in one easy-to-use software package that has won several educational software awards in Europe and the USA.

^{(Source:http://www.geogebra.org)}

Scilab is a comprehensive, powerful and free software package for numerical mathematics applications, formerly developed at the Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (INRIA) in France since 1990 as an alternative to MATLAB and further developed by the Scilab consortium since 2003. Since July 2008, the Scilab consortium has been a member of the Digiteo Foundation. Since July 2012, the publishing and development is done by Scilab Enterprises.

^{(Source: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scilab)}

Maxima is a system for manipulating symbolic and numeric expressions. This includes differential calculus, integral calculus, Taylor series, Laplace transforms, simple differential equations, systems of linear equations, polynomials, lists, vectors, matrices, etc. Maxima also handles the output of functions and data in 2D and 3D.

VLC is a media player that can play almost all multimedia formats. This includes DVD, Audio CD, VCD and various streaming protocols.

Inkscape is a free vector graphics editor whose capabilities are comparable to those of Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw or Xara X. Inkscape uses the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file format standardized by the W3C. Among other things, Inkscape allows you to work with a wide variety of shapes, paths, texts, selections, clones, transparency effects (alpha), transformations, gradients, patterns and groups. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons metadata, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, path-bound text, object-flowing text, direct XML editing, and more. Formats such as PostScript, EPS, JPEG, PNG and TIFF can be imported. Exported are PNG as well as various vector-based formats.

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program.

The specialisation of the software is the intensive editing of individual images, for which a variety of effects ("filters") are available. In addition, further functions can be added via scripts.

Scribus is a free desktop publishing program. It is used for professional layout creation and is comparable to Adobe PageMaker, QuarkXpress or Adobe InDesign. Unlike these proprietary programs, Scribus is free software and licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Scribus supports a variety of features needed for professional artwork. These include color management (with LittleCMS), color separation through CMYK output, PDFs to PDF/X-3 standard, PDF import, tables and vector drawings. Scribus also offers advanced PDF functionality such as PDF presentation creation and PDF forms. However, managing footnotes and endnotes is not yet supported.

To be able to display PDF documents, there are many free programs in addition to proprietary ones. A list of these programs can be found at pdfreaders.org.

For Linux and Mac OSX, the generation of PDF documents is integrated into the system.

For MS Windows, this requires utilities that provide a virtual printer to the system. These printers do not print on paper, but generate PDF documents.

Eclipse is a programming tool for developing all kinds of software. Eclipse was originally used as an integrated development environment for the Java programming language, but it is now also used for many other development tasks due to its extensibility. There are a large number of extensions for Eclipse, both open source and from commercial providers.

Eclipse itself is based on Java technology, since version 3.0 on a so-called OSGi framework called Equinox.

NetBeans IDE is a development environment that was written entirely in the Java programming language and runs on the NetBeans platform. The NetBeans IDE was mainly developed for the Java programming language, but also supports C, C++ and dynamic programming languages.

Qt Creator IDE is an integrated development environment designed especially for the development of platform-independent C++ programs and QML interfaces with the Qt library. Qt Creator does not contain its own compiler, but uses external programs, such as the gcc compiler collection, to generate the executable code.

Thonny is a development environment for Python aimed at beginners. It enables the step-by-step evaluation of expressions and offers some help. The user interface is free of all functions that could distract beginners. Thonny comes with an integrated Python, so that only a simple installation programme is required to learn programming. However, an already installed Python installation can also be used.

R is a free software environment for processing statistical data.

RKWard is an easy-to-use, extensible graphical user interface for R. The functionalities of RKWard can be extended using plugins.

QualCoder is a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) written in Python .

QualCoder can import/export files in a diverse range of formats.

VirtualBox is a virtualization software that makes it possible to run one or more fully-fledged operating systems on a host system. This allows you to test different operating systems without touching your original system. It can also be used to run software that is not available for the personal main operating system.