Corfy's Corner My little corner of the web.

One of the first things I talk about when I mention open-source software is that it is free. One of the first questions I get after I mention that is, "How good can it be if it is free?" Another question I get is "How can they give it away for free?"

Both of those are good questions, but if you dismiss the software without learning the answers to those questions, you are cutting yourself out of a potential gold-mine of free, powerful, and often easy-to-use software that can handle almost any task that you want to throw at it.

The best person to answer your question about how good open-source software can be is you. Download and try a few open-source programs and see for yourself. Four that I would recommend to get started are Mozilla Firefox, a wonderful web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird, and excellent email program, OpenOffice.org, a superb and complete office suite, and GIMP, and extremely powerful photo editor. All of those are free to download, and are available for multiple computer operating systems. There may be something about those individual programs that you don't like, but if you give them an honest look, I think you will have to admit that the programs, and their capabilities, are rather impressive. For that matter, you may like these programs better than their more expensive counterparts.

I understand if you are still a little skeptical about open-source software, so consider these facts. Approximately 90 percent of all email sent through the world is sent to or from open-source email servers. Over 70 percent of all web servers in the world use open-source software (including the server that houses this website). In June of 2004, Microsoft's Internet Explorer was used by 95% of the people in the world who surfed the internet. By July 2005, their usage was down around 85%, with Mozilla Firefox gaining those lost percentage points since it was officially released November 2004 (although it was available long before it was officially released). As mentioned earlier, Firefox is an open-source web browser.

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta), recently concluded that "OSS (Open-Source Software) can be implemented successfully as a networking solution within the technical infrastruction and with obvious cost benefits." They further state, "the possibility of setting up dual-platform PCs indicates that OSS already has adequate functionality."

I could go on and on about how good Open-source software is, but I won't bore you too much with details.

The second question I am usually asked, as I said before, concerns how it can be given away. Simple. It can be given away because it is being worked on by people like you and me. People, especially programmers, contribute their time and knowledge to the project without expecting to be paid for it. Why they do that is almost as varied as the number of people who do it. Some people are learning how to program, some people are trying to keep up on their programming skills, some people are programmers in their job but they want to work on a project they think is more fun in their spare time. Then you get a group of people together who have an interest in working on a common project, but they have different abilities and specialties, so they can together complete projects that individually they could never hope to accomplish.

Now a brief explanation of what "free" means. I know this sounds silly, but it is an important concept to open-source. Open-source allows you to 1) download, install, and use the software for any purpose you like on as many computers as you like, 2) to download the source code for the programs so you can see how it works, 3) make changes to the source code as you see fit and make your own product. The only limitation is if you do number 3, you must release your changes as open-source as well.

One issue you will hear, especially from software companies like Microsoft, is the question of security. How secure, they ask, can open-source be if everyone can see their code? The question to ask back is how secure "closed source" programs are. One company compared Microsoft's Internet Explorer to Mozilla's Firefox for 2004. Their conclusion? A fully-patched Internet Explorer was completely free from threats for a grand total of 7 days during 2004, resulting in IE being "unsafe" for 98% of 2004. "There was only one period in 2004 when there were no publicly known remote code execution bugs," said ScanIT's report. "Between the 12th and the 19th of October. That means a fully patched Internet Explorer installation was known to be unsafe for 98 percent of 2004." Firefox, on the other hand, was only "unsafe" 15%, or about 56 days, of 2004, and at no time were there worms or viruses that actively targeted Firefox. You would think that with the source code freely available, there would be more than that, even considering that Internet Explorer has a virutual monopoly on the web.

Here is a list of Open-Source Software that I use on a regular basis on my Windows computer, although most of these programs are available for other computer platforms.

Ok, I admit it, some of those programs I don't use exclusively. Nvu is not a program I use very often because I prefer to code my own HTML by hand, but it comes in handy now and then. I don't listen to or edit too much music on my computer, so Zinf and Audacity don't get much of a workout.

On the other hand, although I have Microsoft Office 2003 installed on my Windows computer, I very much prefer to use OpenOffice.org. I also can no longer stand to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer unless I absolutely have to. I think Firefox is a much better program. I use Microsoft Outlook at work because I have to, but I definitely prefer Thunderbird for my home accounts, even though, as I mentioned, I have Microsoft Outlook installed at home. I can't imagine using anything other than 7-zip or Filezilla for their respective tasks.

Of course, the ultimate open-source program is GNU/Linux, which I wrote about on another page. In a nutshell, however, GNU/Linux (more popularly known as simply Linux) is a Microsoft Windows replacement. Linux definitely takes some getting used to, and I encourage anyone considering Linux to do their homework beforehand, but Linux does have several advantages.