zkanji is a free, open-source Japanese language learning tool and also a kanji and word dictionary software providing many useful features for those who are interested in the Japanese language. I've started making zkanji in the hope that it can help me study kanji and I hope that it will help others too. While I can't guarantee that it will do your studying for you, maybe you can use it to your benefit.

If you have doubts that this program is for you, please take a look at the screenshots or read the information page about its capabilities. You can also download and use it as much as you'd like! Read the licence information page to see how free it really is, and for acknowledgement of used materials.

For this list, we looked for quality, open source alternatives to software that has a reputation for being expensive. Whenever possible, we included MSRPs for the expensive software, though in some cases, the pricing scheme is so complicated that it's nearly impossible to pin down.

We published a similar list last year, and we've updated and expanded the list for 2011. If you have suggestions for next year's list, feel free to note them in the comments section below.

SparkleShare is a collaboration and sharing tool that is designed to keep things simple and to stay out of your way.

Syncany is an open-source cloud storage and filesharing application. It allows users to backup and share certain folders of their workstations using any kind of storage, e.g. FTP, Amazon S3 or Google Storage.

Zfone™ is a new secure VoIP phone software product which lets you make encrypted phone calls over the Internet. Its principal designer is Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP, the most widely used email encryption software in the world. Zfone uses a new protocol called ZRTP, which has a better architecture than the other approaches to secure VoIP.

* Doesn't depend on signaling protocols, PKI, or any servers at all. Key negotiations are purely peer-to-peer through the media stream * Interoperates with any SIP/RTP phone, auto-detects if encryption is supported by other endpoint * Available as a "plugin" for existing soft VoIP clients, effectively converting them into secure phones * Available as an SDK for developers to integrate into their VoIP applications * IETF has published the protocol spec as RFC 6189, and source code is published

Rubber is a program whose purpose is to handle all tasks related to the compilation of LaTeX documents. This includes compiling the document itself, of course, enough times so that all references are defined, and running BibTeX to manage bibliographic references. Automatic execution of dvips to produce PostScript documents is also included, as well as usage of pdfLaTeX to produce PDF documents.

Want the latest and greatest that Chromium OS has to offer? Weren't one of the lucky ones to receive a Google Chrome Notebook? Vanilla is for you! Each day at around 6PM GMT the latest code is downloaded automatically and compiled into images you can try out, containing the latest changes. You can get images in either USB, VirtualBox or VMWare format. For the best experience, it's recommended you use the USB images. If these don't boot on your device then go ahead and try the VirtualBox or VMWare image. These should always work (assuming the build wasn't broken at the time they were built), but you'll find they're quite slow, because there's no graphical acceleration.

Cloud Foundry, a VMware-led project is the world’s first open Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. Cloud Foundry provides a platform for building, deploying, and running cloud apps using Spring for Java developers, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby developers, Node.js and other JVM frameworks including Grails.

At BackType, we are heavy users of Hadoop. We use it to run computations on our 30TB datastore of social data. We've even open-sourced some significant projects that are built on top of Hadoop.

Unfortunately, Hadoop has problems. It's sloppily implemented and requires all sorts of arcane knowledge to operate it. We would be the first to try out a replacement for Hadoop if a viable alternative existed. In this post, we'll look at some of the darker aspects of Hadoop.

This latest trend to devise and deploy legal strategies against open source seems to me to represent an admission on Microsoft's part that it can no longer compete on technology. Instead, the dinosaurs have decided that it's time to play really dirty – and nothing is dirtier than enforcing bad monopolies using worse laws.