The Independent magazine from the UK has ranked the Top 10 websites offering the most famous open-source products and services of 2005. Topping the list are two well-known websites: the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the browser provider Firefox. 
1. www.wikipedia.org: This is the most famous online encyclopedia in the world, featuring 2.3 million entries in about 180 languages and updated annually by tens of thousands of volunteers. It is regarded as the most powerful information system and has had a profound impact on the history of human knowledge. 
2. www.mozilla.org/products/firefox: This website specializes in providing the world’s most famous open-source browser, Firefox. Currently, Firefox is seen as the optimal and free alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which is plagued with security flaws. Firefox is considered one of the greatest achievements that the open-source community has contributed to global users.
3. www.openoffice.org: This website provides the free OpenOffice office suite, which is fully equipped with modern features and is competitive with the powerful Microsoft Office. OpenOffice creates some different file formats compared to Microsoft Office but can still save and read all Microsoft Office file formats. Another advantage is that it can convert all its files into the popular PDF format. Using OpenOffice saves users between $150 to $500 compared to purchasing the widely used Microsoft Office suite.
4. www.bittorrent.com: This website specializes in providing a “super efficient” peer-to-peer file sharing tool. This excellent downloading tool is clearly not guilty of any wrongdoing, but it is extremely popular among users who download music and movies illegally, leading to a campaign by the industrial copyright community to eradicate Bittorrent from the digital world.
5. www.mediawiki.org/wki/MediaWiki: This is a documentation system that allows people to collaborate on the same document regardless of geographical conditions. It is a powerful collaborative tool that enables multiple users to contribute content to a single location for reference and editing. MediaWiki is considered one of the most outstanding branches of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
6. www.xvid.org: This website specializes in providing open-source codecs for creating audio and video compression applications used on the Internet. The most notable achievement of this site is the creation of the renowned MP3 digital audio format, which has a compression ratio of only 10% compared to the original WAV file from CD, while maintaining almost unchanged sound quality.
7. www.phpbb.com: The most famous forum creation tool website in the world today. The PhpBB Forum is widely used by many people worldwide who are involved in writing improvements and expanding functionalities. PhpBB has been localized quite well in Vietnamese.
8. www.outfoxed.org: A network dedicated to films from Fox News. Film professionals can find effective techniques for their industry on this site.
9. www.dynebolic.org: This website serves as a counterpoint to Microsoft Windows, providing all knowledge and resources on open-source software, with a particular focus on the Linux environment and its open-source licenses (GNU).
10. www.gimp.org: This website specializes in providing open-source graphic processing software called GIMP. It offers many useful tools that Photoshop Elements and other photo editing software do not have. GIMP allows for multi-selection, working with layers and paths, as well as the ability to choose various effects and use alpha channels to create transparent images.
In addition to the Top 10 mentioned above, the website http://httpd.apache.org specializes in providing the open-source Apache web server software, and the website www.SourceForge.net, which offers source code for open-source projects, is also among the top valuable sites in the realm of open-source services.
THUY KHANH
