MaxedOutMama
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Open Source
From time to time, I'll post the best open source software links I've found.
Today, we have
http://www.mozilla.org
This is the website for mozilla, an open source browser. I also recommend Firefox. These browsers are more secure than IE, and I find them more useful. Mozilla's Composer is a webpage editor that I like. It comes with Mozilla.
You don't need to pay for Microsoft Office:
http://www.openoffice.org
This office suite will load all your standard file types. I use it almost exclusively. It includes an option to convert to pdf (Acrobat format).
Open source software is free. The old adage of "You get what you pay for" doesn't apply, however. Look at it this way - there are tens of thousands of programmers out there. If a company with a thousand employees has to pay for MS Office on most workstations, it will cost that company tens of thousands of dollars. It is cheaper for companies to contribute their programmers' time to a joint public license program such as OpenOffice. They get access to the current source code, plus an off the shelf product that works just fine. The usefulness of these products has increased to the point that they are often more useful than the commercial products. We all benefit.
Today, we have
http://www.mozilla.org
This is the website for mozilla, an open source browser. I also recommend Firefox. These browsers are more secure than IE, and I find them more useful. Mozilla's Composer is a webpage editor that I like. It comes with Mozilla.
You don't need to pay for Microsoft Office:
http://www.openoffice.org
This office suite will load all your standard file types. I use it almost exclusively. It includes an option to convert to pdf (Acrobat format).
Open source software is free. The old adage of "You get what you pay for" doesn't apply, however. Look at it this way - there are tens of thousands of programmers out there. If a company with a thousand employees has to pay for MS Office on most workstations, it will cost that company tens of thousands of dollars. It is cheaper for companies to contribute their programmers' time to a joint public license program such as OpenOffice. They get access to the current source code, plus an off the shelf product that works just fine. The usefulness of these products has increased to the point that they are often more useful than the commercial products. We all benefit.
