Taking Control of
Your Software

Over the past fifteen years computing hardware power  has  increased exponentially while at the same time, prices has fallen dramatically. This is due to consumer acceptance of a single hardware platform, the Intel compatible processor. In an open and free market, completion from manufacturers and mass production then take over and the results you see in the vast range and power of PC hardware available today.

Over the last fifteen years software has grown in power and ease of use by consumer acceptance of a operating system standard, Microsoft Windows. Given a free and open market one would expect cost savings similar to what we have experienced on the hardware market.

This column does not intend to explore why software prices have continued to go up with even more computers being built today than in the past.  Rather we will look at what you can do today to begin reducing the cost of using your computer for basic productivity.

The core of your computing experience today is built on the operating system, so any change you or I can make should be base upon your current Windows experience.

To begin controlling the cost of your software today, I recommend that you begin using Open Source software.  Open Source is publicly available code and is largely developed and released in the public domain.  This means Open Source is a free way to get great software.

Once you begin using Open Source, like OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office, you immediately begin saving money, a lot of money, on your computing experience.  But more importantly, if you carefully select which software you use, you are also making your computing experience non-OS dependant.

This means that you can today begin using Open Source and other software that is non-OS specific and in the future take your application experience to a new platform.

Once you become comfortable with Open Source applications then you can take it to the next level and switch to an Open Source operating system like Linux.

On this page are best-in-class Open Source and freeware software that will not lock you into a single OS so you can begin saving on software upgrades today and pave the way should you decide to change your Operating System in the future.

Should you decide that you want to move to a non-Microsoft operating system on your current PC, Linux is by far your best choice.

The Linux OS is now available in two formats.  Fee based and free versions.  Possibly the best know fee based flavor of Linux is Red Hat, while the free version is now known as Fedora.

Should you decide to run Fedora or another free Linux distribution for a totally free software experience you must  be willing to learn how to install software packages and initiate OS updates.  Neither operation is a easy to accomplish as you are used to in Windows.

A benefit to Linux is that it requires less hardware resources than Windows, so while Windows Vista will require hardware upgrades to most PCs, Linux will continue to run on your current hardware.