Open Source Software – Why Free is Often Just the Right Price!

Have you heard of Open Source Software? If not, you should know about this – particularly if you are a nonprofit struggling to make ends meet, or a start-up working with a restricted budget. OSS (per Wikipedia) is “computer software with its source code made available and licensed with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.” In many cases OSS is developed as a collaborative effort, and indeed new versions come out regularly when an OSS project has been embraced by the community.

There’s nothing slapdash or sloppy about the software or the movement to make it available. The Open Source Initiative acts as something of an oversight group to educate the word about open source and its many benefits. Along the way they have developed the de facto standards for what constitutes Open Source Software. You can read the full list here – included are the expectations about redistribution, branding, integrity of code, non-discrimination, and other important issues.

And, don’t think of this movement as being driven by pirates or anarchists, some of the most powerful digital organizations in the world are backers of the Open Source Initiative, including Adobe, Google, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM.

The upshot for many of us is that we get software we can use for free, even when we are using it in ways that might be helping us make money. In many cases, the products available via open source are as good, or better than their commercial counterparts which may cost several hundred dollars. Here are some examples of open source tools and the products they could replace.

Thunderbird for email, instead of Outlook ($110)

Tight VNC for remote access, instead of LogMeIn ($99 per year)

Dia for creating diagrams and charts, instead of Visio ($299)

Gimp for graphics editing, instead of Photoshop ($20 per month)

Open Office as an office suite, instead of Microsoft Office ($219)

xPDF instead of Adobe Acrobat ($449)

Open Antivirus, for computer protection, instead of McAfee ($50 per year)

Whether you love the open source concept because it saves you a ton of money, or embrace the spirit of free and fair use as a personal credo, Open Source Software is definitely worth your consideration.