#72 - Open Source

Why pay for something when you can get it for "free". This is the American bargain hunters mantra. Find "free" stuff and abuse it! I think we all were taught as children the following quaint cliches: 'You pay for what you get', 'There is no free lunch', 'Pay me now or pay me later'

Each gets the point across of Caveat Emptor - Let the buyer beware. So having said that lets talk about free software. Two items: Operating systems and Office software are what using a computer is all about. Both are dominated by Microsoft with their Windows and MS Office products.(Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook) Both are expensive in the sense that they generally cost more then what we think is fair. PCSS makes a bit of money selling Microsoft products, but to be honest, not enough to make us completely loyal to the Bill Gate Money Machine.

There are alternatives to Microsoft products and, gasp!, they don't cost a penny. In the case of Operating Systems, the Linux open source product has been around almost as long as Windows. Many companies have tried to make some money off of Linux, but Microsoft has just plowed them under. If you are an experimenter in nature you might want to take that old Pentium III PC you have thought about throwing away and install Linux on for a try. Our favorite flavor of Linux is Ubunto http://www.ubuntu.com/. Ubunto contains a windows like version of Linux, a web browser, games and Open Office (we'll talk about it below). The only cost you have is your time and plan on a fair bit of that (couple of hours) to get your old PC up and running.

In the case of productivity suites (defined here as MS Office), there is the Sun Microsystems product called Open Office. Open Office has many of the MS Office products and is mostly compatible with them. Their equivalents are Writer=Word, Calc=Excel, Impress=PowerPoint, Data=Access. Open Office also contains Math and Draw components. The programs can open and write MS Office compatible files. They are different programs and don't have all the features and the features they do have in common aren't arranged in the same menu structure. Still the price is right ($0). Open Office is available for Windows, Linux and Mac! Here is there site: http://www.openoffice.org/.

So check out this "free" software and let us know what you think.