Starting a venture usually means bootstrapping and stretching your dollars. Open source isn't just a great way to save money. It is also a great way to support others creations either by reporting bugs, developing plugins or donating to the creator for future enhancements and support.

Whether you are looking for programs to dabble in yourself or trying to find solutions for your designers and developers, these programs are high quality and will not disappoint.

Design:

• Gimp - This photo editing program is very similar to Adobe's Photoshop. Anyone who has worked with other photo editing programs should feel at home in a short amount of time. This program is pixel/raster based.
• Inkscape - This is a vector graphics based program similar to Adobe's Illustrator. This program is big on the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. This format has gained popularity with the rise of responsive web design and high resolution monitors.

Development:

• Notepad++ - This Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is straight forward and clean. The program is fairly customizable. This is a solid program to check out for a simple but usable development environment.
• KineticWing - This IDE is up and coming. It has support for many of the more recent developments in web design and development. Although this product is currently in beta, it is definitely a product to keep in mind.