Computerworld columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols recently posted this article on his blog.
In it, he showed how a serious economic downturn may be good news for the open-source movement.
He outlined five specific programs that can be replaced by FOSS alternatives.
The five are MS Office, Outlook, Quicken, Sharepoint, and Windows itself.
The FOSS replacements are Open Office, Thunderbird, GnuCash, Alfresco, and, of course, Linux.
V-N is an open-source advocate, and we need more of 'em. He doesn't like Windows. That is generally what happens to someone who gets into the world of FOSS.
That is off-putting to many who have been happily running Windows for years. But you have to understand that once you have been exposed to something that is vastly superior to what you have long been used to, the natural reaction is anger at whatever it was that had earlier led you to believe that it was as good as things got.
This is particularly the case with Windows, which has proven itself to be adequate at best, criminally underhanded at worst in its long-term ride at the top of the O/S market.
So why switch to another operating system when Vista or XP came installed on your computer at no cost to you? Here's V-N's excellent point::
What I will point out though is that no one in their right mind runs Windows without security software. That means people buy, at a minimum, an anti-virus program. If you go for the whole she-bang of anti-virus, firewall, anti-spam, etc. etc., Norton Internet Security 2009 will sock your wallet for $50. Linux doesn't need a lot of that junk and what it does need, like a firewall, comes bundled in it.
Yes, there are freeware alternatives. But I'm not as keen on them as I was, say, three years ago.
AVG was an essential install for any users' computers that I worked on to harden against internet threats.
But then they scared many of their customers into upgrading to a newer version, threatening that updating the old version would soon stop.
Well, in a nutshell, that never happened. Many AVG freeware users are still running Windows 98 and 95! Upgrading simply wasn't an option. So, much FUD was generated for them, and really, everyone else running AVG freeware.
In all fairness to AVG, it has been very generous of them to offer free virus protection all these years. But if a single entity chooses to give something away for free, it could stop doing so at any point, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.
With the Free Open Source Software movement, YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THAT!
Spyware is another matter. This insidious threat simply can not be combatted with 100% effectiveness. I used to recommend running all free spyware killers just to be sure. Now, much spyware pretends to be spyware killers themselves!
In short, it's a cesspool. Microsoft's proprietary O/S has proven to be indefensible from malware.
So give it up, try a free alternative, discipline yourself to learn a new paradigm (a paradigm that really isn't radically different from what you have been used to).
Take FULL control of your computer. As long as it has Windows on it, it's being controlled by lots of other folks, a few friendly, most not, who have back-door keys.
