... This Christmas I decided to give a few gifts to people in the open source<http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/12/get_and_give_th.html#>community. I'm making donations to the maintainers of some of my favorite and most widely used software projects. They've earned some payback! Most of the programs I depend on the most, I've discovered, are actually not big ones -- they're little things, applications that fill in the gaps, and that make my work all the easier. The first big open source project that gets a little of my Christmas cheer is the PortableApps <http://www.portableapps.com/> suite, an incredibly useful bundle of no-install-needed editions of popular open-source programs. It's a one-stop shop of sorts for a whole slew of common apps -- Firefox, the OpenOffice.org suite, VLC, and 7-Zip -- and it can be run either from a removable drive or from a single self-contained directory on a PC. I've pointed a number of friends to it as an easy way to consolidate all of their applications and documents into one place. If they upgrade to a new machine -- or if their PC ever gets borked and they need to recover files<http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/12/get_and_give_th.html#>from it -- they can simply copy the PortableApps directory somewhere else and pick up right where they left off. ... http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/12/get_and_give_th.html -- http://users.ntua.gr/karounos/ - skype: karounos