When you hear geeks talk about “open source” software, things always end up with this impossible divide between Linux and Windows (okay, “proprietary software” for you Linux cultists out there – like Aaron!).

But it doesn’t have to be all that divisive. There are lots of open source software for proprietary operating systems, I mean, Windows…

Anyway, besides the common stuff like OpenOffice, there are quite a few that do the job as well as – and sometimes better than – paid software. Think of Filezilla, Songbird, Gimp, 7-Zip…

These are the few that I can recommend because I actually use them all the time on my Windows Vista machine.

…

Tired of the increasingly bloated and unwieldy beast called iTunes? Give Songbird, a new open-source music player a spin.

It has a lot of the nice Apple interface, but it doesn’t come with the heft of iTunes. The most important piece of news is that it supports iPods via a plug-in, letting you sync your PC’s tracks with your portable MP3 player. You can also manually manage your tracks.

Besides being relatively light, Songbird can be customised with plug-ins, a la Firefox. There’s a particularly useful one that lets you look out for both doppelganger MP3 files and orphaned ones, so it’s great if you got a large collection and are trying to keep track of your thousands of songs.

And what’s not to like, especially when you even get attractive MediaFlow album covers on screen! All you need is an add-on, and of course, you only install it, if you want, so there’s no bloat.

I haven’t sync’d my iPod nano, which I mostly use just for jogging, in months because of the problems with the increasingly fat iTunes. Am I glad that something has come along from a third-party that is actually this good.