- by Marianne Van der Wel

Open source software is free software available to the public that has been developed by a consortium of people sharing their time and expertise for a variety of reasons -- to gain experience, to share expertise, or to prevent commercial monopolies from taking over the net. Open source software web sites often suggest donations but I’ve never been pressured to do so. Not only is open source software free but it often rivals and, at times, surpasses the quality of commercial packages.

Open source software is available from several web sites. One of the most popular is Source Forge.

The open source packages I use are: 

Mozilla’s Firefox web browser and its Thunderbird email program, both with updated security features. 

PDFcreator, a wonderful tool that lets me create PDF, JPG, GIF and other graphical file formats from ANY program simply by printing to a virtual printer called PDFcreator. 

Open Office, developed by Sun Microsystems, provides all the same tools as Microsoft Office such as word processing, spreadsheets, database, drawing and presentation software. You will need to learn some new key strokes to do the same tasks as you are accustomed to with Microsoft, but since this package is free you can save a lot of money! Open Office is also very good at converting from and to Microsoft formatted files including the newer docx formatted files that some people cannot read with older Microsoft software. 

For the technically inclined, the source code for all open source software is freely available in addition to the executable program in case you wish to modify the program.

For more information about open source, see: http://www.opensource.org.