P I L O T I

As some of you will know, I am a bit of a bore when it comes to open source software and free software. These two things are not always the same thing, but often are. I won't go into the differences here, so, for the ease of reading, let us assume that free software isopen source software.

So, over the weekend, I happened to be in one of the countries larger computer shops. You know the sort of lace, stacked to the gills with shiny Dell's, HP'S, Alien Ware machines [HP's with a 25% premium] and of course the joy of all Jobsian fanboys, the over priced and ever restrictive Apple boxes.

I happened to overhear a conversation between a mature couple and a spotty little oik pretending to be an adult. He was trying to persuade the naïve sexagenarians to part with a large amount of money to buy Microsoft Outlook. They declined.

And left the building.

I followed them out and had a chat with them. All they want to 'do email'. Nothing clever, nothing
fancy, they just wanted to 'do their email'. So, I suggested they could try Mozilla Thunderbird. They had never heard of it. Do they know about Firefox. Oh yes, they use it all the time. The 'orangey one'. Yes, that is it. Go to the same place, look for the 'blue bird' and there is a bit of software that will 'do their email'. It'll do more, far more, if they want it to, but, it will 'so their email'. When I told them it was free, like the 'orangey thing', they were very happy.

I hope they did download it and are now happy with their new found emaily freedom. But that got me thinking. Open source software. How much money could you save if you really were on a budget ? Well, think of this scenario. You have an oldish [one, two years old] laptop and want to 'do stuff' with it. Lets look at the options. The prices are taken from the MS website this very evening.

• Vista Basic : £140
  Outlook [stand alone] : £112
  Office Home Basic : £324 includes Outlook

Or, and here is the kicker :

• Linux : £00.00
  Thunderbird or Evolution [stand alone] : £00.00
  Open Office*: £00.00

*The current version is V2.4 is compatible with all MS office formats, except their new .x format, such as *.*docx. This is the £324 Office 2007 option. Download Open Office 3.0, currently in the final stages of testing, and it is still open source and free and does open and save in the new *.x MS Office 2007 formats.


So far so good.

But what about other things. Money management ? MS Money, $60. I happen to use GnuCash. The latter supports almost every banking download formats as well as MS Money and Quicken formats. The price : £00.00. The GIMP is just about as good as it gets for doing anything 'arty', from creating graphics and managing 'photos. Price :£ 00.00.

For Photoshop, Adobe will be asking for $700. Yep folks, $700.
You can see a bit of a theme here. Don’t forget the raft of excellent astronomy software [Celestia or Stellarium] , graphics software, a stack of games and a wealth of specialist programmes for mathematics, science and education. The cost of this wealth of joys : you guessed it, nothing.

So, on a basic level £464 is the minimum saving by going to open source. This is for the operating system and an office package. For the rest, the savings are unlimited. If you are interested in more free software, take a peek at this finance website [ http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/free-office-software ] for a range of free excellent software. A peek at a link that can also be found on this site for a range of free and very good anti virus software just goes to show that you don't have to be loaded to have the very best software on the market.

What do I use : Mandrive 9, with Firefox and sometimes Konqueror, with Thunderbird with the calendar plug in. GnuCash and Stellarium. Oh and Open Office 3.0 for all my scribbling needs…….

Cost : not a vegan suasage.[/FONT][/COLOR][/ALIGN]