Is it true that there is no such thing as a free lunch?
Over recent years the Open Source movement, which dates back to the `80s, has been growing at an amazing rate. The aim of Open Source is to produce excellent free computing solutions for the common good. There are literally thousands of Open Source projects in existence, many of which are produce very professional software. But who does it, and why do they bother? Well, first the ‘who’, the people working in these projects range from hobbyists hacking programs in their spare time, to whole teams of professional developers employed by large corporations, including IBM and Sun Microsystems. And the ‘why’? A hobbyist might be drawn to it by the romance of putting something back into society and being part of a large exciting team that produce a high quality product. The large corporations see the benefits of supporting a project that they can use at a fraction of what it would cost to be produced in house.
One good example of this is the Office productivity suite OpenOffice.org. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software and much more. In some ways it lags behind the major commercial package Microsoft® Office, and in ways it exceeds it. The question you must ask is, are the differences worth the extra £300 to you? (£100 for a student and teacher licence.)
Later this year the new version of the popular Microsoft® Internet Explorer web browser is due to be released. Major new features included have been available to users of Firefox, another Open Source product, for some time. Just because it is free, it can still show originality.
So why not give them a try? All it will cost you is the time it takes to download them from the Internet and with the money you save why not buy someone lunch?
Some of our favourite OpenSource Software
Web Browser
Office productivity suite
Database
Operation System
Version Control System (generally used for control software development projects)
An interface to SubVersion