As fantastic as it appears, there are outfits and foundations around the world that actively develop and distribute software for no cost. The reason for them giving away their software depends on company to company, but the advantages to the consumers is huge.
Back in the 70′s, computer geeks and nerds would develop software and give it to other programmers for free to try and make it better. Along came a man called Bill Gates who saw a business opportunity in developing software for computers and built Altair BASIC. Rather alarmingly for him, his software was also given away around and he ended up writing a long letter explaining why software should not be free (Google Bill Gates Open Letter).
Recently, the open source collective has been acquiring a big foothold in the software market, essentially caused by developing countries who can’t afford the licensing fees of commercial software like Windows, MS Office, Dreamweaver and even Programming Languages.
There are free versions of just about everything, from e-commerce solutions to images. The open source concept has even hit the food and drink market with open source recipes for wine and beer now available on the World Wide Web. I am actually typing this brief article on a piece of open source software called Open Office, a free alternative to MS Word, and it’s running on Ubuntu, a free alternative to Windows or Mac OS X.
When it comes to websites, there is a lot of free available to power any kind of site. Web development companies such as WordPress and Wikimedia Foundation release products free for anyone to use. What makes it very effective is that open source customization can be done by lots of companies around the world.
Choosing open source software to power your website sets up a fantastic base from which to start, for example WordPress is perfect for virtually any kind of site, but with a bit of WordPress customization you can have it meet your exact specifications for a fraction of the cost of coding it from scratch.
Before you purchase your next software, always look to discover if there is an open source option on the market. Especially relevant during these hard times, open source software may be one way you or your organization can lower its costs.