So you may not have the two grand lying around to spring for Adobe’s latest suite of web design tools, you may not even have the hundred or so dollars that it takes to get the entry level office package for your Mac or Windows Machine, and then when it comes to image editing you are really left with yet another large outlay or some watered down version of the most popular packages that leave you wanting more. You are in luck, as the following list of tools will help you accomplish all of your design, coding, editing, and content drafting tasks with no cash outlay. These are the best open source packages that I could come up with that 1) Work on a Mac and Windows, and 2) somewhat resemble the for profit version of the software that it takes the place of.

1. An Office Package – Undeniably the number one package out there is Oracle’s Open Office 3, which lets you create Presentations (like PowerPoint or Keynote), Spreadsheets (Excel or Numbers), Databases (Like Access), and Drawings. You can also open files created in MS Office as well as save the files back to office format or PDF. Take a look for yourself, you are free to download and distribute it to whomever you like. http://why.openoffice.org/index.html
2. An IDE (Like Dreamweaver, but so much better at scripting) – Take a look at Aptana Studio, it is by far one of the most feature packed IDEs with some of the latest Ajax libraries plus Adobe Air support built in.
3. Free Web Hosting – http://www.freewebhostingarea.com/ (for your test sites, and school projects)
4. Finally, you will need an image editing package, and before I get to the link, I must say that if I was to pay cash for any of the alternative programs on the list it would be for a decent image editing program, but if you still want to go Open Source all the way you should be safe with GIMP – The GNU Image Manipulation Program

There you have it the basics are all covered all you have to do now is create.