The internet is a wonderful place for all sorts of information and this article looks at where to find free software to undertake a variety of different tasks.
When the internet was invented by Tim Berners-Lee back in the early 1990’s it was his wish that everything on it was there to be of benefit to mankind, and not to make considerable amounts of money from.
Microsoft, Google and Amazon, together with all the other large and small businesses who use the internet to generate profits, have used the technology available on the internet to provide their products and to generate a profit.
At the same time that these commercial enterprises were being developed, a host of programmers have continued to develop free open source software which is available for everybody, usually at low cost.
Some of the best examples of these include Open Office, which is the equivalent of the Microsoft Office suite and includes a spreadsheet, database, word processing software and publishing software, completely free of charge and very powerful, and web development content management software such as Joomla.
Where do you go to find these programmes and how effective are they?
The best source of free software is www.sourceforge.net, which contains most of the free Open Source software programmes that are available for download, together with forums to discuss their effectiveness, develop the sections for anyone who wants to add code to the products and applications, and details of any support packages that are available to purchase with the free downloads.
One thing you have to be aware of with Open Source software is that it almost always requires an element of programming skills and knowledge, unless the software is consumer based such as Open Office.
A quick example of this would be the Joomla Content Management software, which usually requires some knowledge of PHP, HTML and FTP programming and routines, and a basic understanding of content management systems.
If you compared this with a commercial piece of software this would be a completely different approach as the commercial provider would almost have definitely installed the software and there would be no issues in relation to any programming to go with it.
However, the Open Source software is used by some of the largest organisations in the world for a whole host of different applications and is getting better all the time as bugs that tend to lurk in quite a few of the programmes get fixed.
There are lots of different products available including CRM systems (V Tiger), Mass e-mailers, recruitment software, finance and accounting software, database management software, calendar and organisation software and e-mail software.
In fact there is no longer any need at all to purchase software for your computer provided you are able to install and set these programmes up.
Not sure how to set up these programmes? Get in touch with www.businessbusstop.com who will be delighted to assist you. We offer full installation packages of any Open Source software you find at a reasonable price which means that you do not have to pay any licence fees, ongoing maintenance costs or any upgrades in future. Get in touch with www.businessbusstop.com to discuss your requirements at enquiries@businessbusstop.com
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