Free and Legal Software - Introduction

Yes, yes, that does say free and legal.

Would you like a high end graphics program like Photoshop, or a vector graphics program like Illustrator? How about an office suite like Microsoft Office, or an email client like Outlook? You can have it all....if you know where to look.

"Free as in speech and beer." That's the mantra of the Open Source community. It means that software should not only be monetarily free (like free beer), but also that people should be able to do what they want with their software (like free speech). This not only means being able to run it on your computer and run it on any computer you have access to, but also being able to modify it to suit your needs or even redistribute it.

Software licensing is a rather confusing thing. When you buy a software title, you don't actually own the software, you have only bought the ability to run the number of copies the license is good for (usually one, but occasionally as many as three). In the case of computer software, if you install it on more than one machine at any given time, you've violated the terms of service, and if you redistribute the software, you could be sued. You're also not allowed to look into the source code of proprietary software.

Open Source Software, however, typically operates under a number of far less restrictive licenses. The most common include the MIT (from the school), BSD (from the operating system), the GPL and LGPL (Gnu Lesser/General Public License), and the Creative Commons/Public Domain licenses. These licenses explicitly allow anyone to do almost anything with a given piece of intellectual property. In the case of software, this includes modifying the source code, redistributing the product, and installing it on any number of machines.

Free beer is good, but in my opinion, free software is even better (of course, I'm not a beer fan, so I guess my opinion doesn't really count). Open source software almost always costs no money for the software itself. Companies that make their money off of open source software generally do it through offering services, such as server administration (Apache web server, Linux-based networks, etc), customer support (Content Management Systems, Linux-based networks), or by providing hardware with the software running on it (computer builders, Cisco, etc). They also, of course, take donations.

By and large, the community supports the software itself. This results in dozens or even hundreds of eyes on the code, catching bugs and holes, or creating new features.

Well, what software do you want to replace? For pretty much any commercial software title on the market, there is an open source alternative.

Below are but a few of the major ones and the proprietary applications they replace. I'll go into some of them in more detail in future posts.

• Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS -- Linux (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Mandriva), BSD (OpenBSD, FreeBSD)
  
• Microsoft Office -- Open Office, Star Office
• Microsoft Outlook -- Thunderbird, Spicebird, Evolution Mail
  
• Adobe Photoshop -- The GIMP
• Adobe Illustrator -- Inkscape
• MSN/Yahoo/AIM Messenger, Trillian -- Pidgin, Empathy
• Microsoft Windows Media Player, Apple iTunes -- Audacious, Songbird, Amarok
• VMWare -- Virtualbox
• Microsoft Internet Information Services (web server) -- Apache, Nginx

These are but a few of the titles that compare. You can find more alternatives to these and other applications a osalt.com.

In future posts, we'll go into more detail about each of the above-listed applications, providing various comparisons between the proprietary titles and their open source counterparts.