E-Business
Issue No. 15 - February/March 2004
A Free Lunch?
by David Twiss
We all know there is no such thing as a free lunch, but what about free software?
Most businesses now have many PCs, most of them running an operating system from Microsoft—one of the many flavours of Microsoft Windows: XP, Windows Server 2003, or the earlier Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows NT and Windows 98 to mention just a few. In fact at most PC retailers one is hard pressed to buy a PC without an operating system.
To do much in the way of real work requires an office suite, comprising a work processor, spreadsheet, presentation program and also an email client.
Microsoft Windows together with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook are just about everywhere today, and that fact has helped Microsoft with its considerable commercial success to date.
It is interesting to observe that, for many businesses, commercial software often makes up more than half of the initial cost of putting a PC on someone’s desk—although the total cost of ownership is often a different matter.
In the server world, different software is used to get real work done. This can include web servers, applications servers, database servers and email servers. Microsoft server operating systems come with a web server and an application server, but a database and email server are extras. In fact, in many database installations the initial and ongoing costs of the database far outweigh the combined cost of the hardware and the operating system.
OK then: what about open source software like linux and open office?
With open source software, the source code is published and usually made available free of charge. Open software is often developed and maintained by volunteers. The most popular open source operating system is Linux which was originally developed by a Finn, Linus Torvalds.
Today Linux is available in many distributions or flavours; each maintained by a different person or group and each with its own special nuances. At time of w...
