Is the “free software” revolution a myth or a temporary trend? I don’t think so. Being a technology evangelist myself, who’s been involved in software usage & construction for over 10 years, I feel that “free software” has a tremendous potential (both a consumer model as well as a business model). Having said that, not all software can be free, due to architecture or implementation constraints.
Anyways, while setting up my new laptop, I had an intriguing idea. Why not consider installing all/most non-commercial software to cater to all my daily computing needs? After a bit of thinking I realized that I already use some free or open-source software accounting to about 40-50% of all my personal software installations. So I took the plunge to make that figure escalate to around 90%.
My laptop came with a pre-installed licensed copy of MS Windows XP MCE so I thought of keeping the OS intact (without going the Linux way) since most of my practical needs revolve around Windows. For my application development needs, I already had an MSDN copy of MS Visual Studio .NET so I kept it as well. Besides these two products, I revamped nearly all software installations on my laptop with free or open-source, yet stable, software products. Eventually I saved upto $4000 in the purchase of software products. Besides, why indulge in software hacking, cracking or piracy when you can have alternatives to commercial software that can save you some serious money.
So here’s a nifty matrix I made depicting & comparing the commercial versus free/open-source software assets I reviewed as part of my revamping process.