Wish you could cre­ate vec­tor art in Adobe Illus­tra­tor, edit videos in Sony Vegas, or just play a game of Halo 2 on your PC, but can’t afford the pro­grams? We’ve all been there, and it sucks, honestly.

Thank­fully, there’s a whole genre of soft­ware com­prised of free solu­tions to the oth­er­wise costly main­stream alter­na­tives. This mag­i­cal genre is called Open Source.

After the break are a few pro­grams that you may find use­ful, with often just as many fea­tures as the costly alternative.

Microsoft Office » OpenOf­fice

The free and open pro­duc­tiv­ity suite.

Autodesk 3ds Max » Blender

The open source, cross plat­form suite of tools for 3D creation.

Adobe Pho­to­shop » GIMP

The GNU Image Manip­u­la­tion Pro­gram, for X Win­dows systems.

Adobe Illus­tra­tor » Inkscape

The vec­tor graph­ics editor.

Tech­smith Camtasia/HyperCam 2 » Cam­stu­dio

The free alter­na­tive for record­ing on-screen video.

Sony Vegas/Adobe Pre­miere » Jahshaka

The world’s first Open­Source Real­time Media Play­back and Visual Effects System.

Tril­lian Pro » Pid­gin

The multi-protocol Instant Mes­sag­ing client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once.

Halo 2 » Sauer­braten

The sin­gle­player (2 game modes, saveg­ames) and mul­ti­player (12 game modes) first per­son shooter.

Gui­tar Hero » Frets on Fire

The open source Gui­tar Hero alternative.

vBul­letin » phpBB3

The most widely used Open Source forum solution.

Microsoft Win­dows » Ubuntu

The free, Debian derived, Linux-based oper­at­ing sys­tem, avail­able with both com­mu­nity and pro­fes­sional support.

By far, the best resource for Open Source appli­ca­tions is SourceForge.net.