The joys of free, open-source software
Software can be expensive. Just go check out what you have to pay to buy certain things.
A copy of Microsoft Office 2007 costs over $300 as of this writing. Sure, you can use another lesser program like WordPad to write documents. But everybody has Microsoft Office, and WordPad won’t give you spreadsheets and database functions—or PowerPoint presentations. What’s a broke computer user to do?
If you want the cool software without the loss of cash, you need to get to know the Open Source movement. If you are in the know, you already know about OpenOffice, the free (and effective) alternative to Microsoft Office.
The concept is simple: instead of copyrighting software and making people pay to use it, do the exact opposite; make it available, free, both for consumer use and for other software engineers to tinker with.
For a long time, during the Web 1.0 era (the early 90s until about somewhere around 2003-2004), open-source software could not keep up with the big guys. Annoying and potentially harmful bugs were more common, and you didn’t know what you were getting. It could be some lone guy trying to infect your computer with a virus. Thus, if you needed reliable, professional applications, you had no choice but to buy something. There has always been interesting free software out there that can do neat stuff (like IrfanView, the popular free image editor) but until recently the Photoshops and the Microsofts of the world were unequaled.
Now, with the dawn of the Web 2.0 era, whole open-source communities have sprung up. These communities collectively test, troubleshoot, and improve upon up-and-coming software to provide the world with quality free products that can do everything the big guys do—and more. OpenOffice can do basically everything that Microsoft Office does, and it can convert documents and spreadsheets into .PDF files, which Office does not offer. Sure, Adobe Photoshop costs hundreds of dollars… but you can do virtually all the same things you do with Photoshop for free when you download the GIMP absolutely free of charge. Or, if you have Photoshop at school and would rather not deal with a foreign program, a man named Scott Moschella tweaked the GIMP to look and feel just like Photoshop and called it GimpShop. Pretty cool, huh?
Best of all, in the open-source community, there’s no law against taking a program and improving it to create something new. In fact, thousands of programmers whose passion is creating new software are constantly doing just that. Many open-source applications are well-enough known that people have published detailed help and tips pages online, so if you have a problem, you are more likely to be able find the answer.
People are also encouraged to participate in the open-source movement by publicizing products, giving their pointers on how to improve upon or troubleshoot a program, or donating to open-source developers in support.
So where should you start trying stuff out? Well, Google will get you quite a lot of free stuff just by searching for “open source software.” But if you really want to see alternatives to everyday applications like Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Office (OpenOffice ain’t the only one!), I suggest you take a look at OSAlt.com.
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