(Some of ) The Best Software in Life is Free
Posted on February 9th, 2005 by JTkPosted in Geek |
So I was thinking about software the other day, free and commercial. All of our servers run Linux -but my desktop machines are Windows XP based ( with Cygwin of course ). So I was thinking that one reason that Linux was so great is that there was all of this great, free software that ran on it. This is undeniably true (sendmail, Apache, KDE, Gnucash, Emacs, etc.) but then I started thinking that in addition to the aforementioned Cygwin a lot of my favorite windows apps were freeware as well.
Now, to be sure, some of the best Windows desktop software cost big bucks - Photoshop, Sonic Foundry’s Acid, Vegas Video, etc. are all pricey and the best available app for their respective tasks, without a freebie counterpart. But for some other high profile apps there are perfectly suitable free replacements.
For example I have no idea why anyone buys Microsoft’s Office products these days. Open Office is a LGPL’d licensed office suite and will suffice for 90% of the worlds word processing and spread sheet needs. In a similar vein Zone Alarm is a firewall that is good enough for most people’s security needs - and you do have security needs whether you know it or not. Combine it with Adaware and all you need to do is add a virus app and you have the security triumvirate.
Some of my other favorite free winware: Putty, a great little ssh client, Irfanview an indispensable image viewer, Revelation from snadboy reveals passwords that you have stored and forgotten, VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility, Partition Saving, and The excellent Cryptainer LE - Free 128bit Encryption Software.
Some of these app are better then anything commercially available ( see adaware, Cryptainer… ) and some are “almost as good” like Open Office. But when the “better” commercial software costs hundreds of dollars and the vast majority of users never use the features that make it “better” is it really better? Anyway, I think one should use free software where available, and I think that one should pony up for commercial software when it is the better option.