655 Old South Head Road, North Rose Bay, NSW, 2030

Telephone:	02-9371-7888
Email:	help@ctbj.com.au
Web:	http://www.ctbj.com.au/
ABN:	12 736 709 475

Open Source (GIMP, Open Office, etc.)

Free and Open Source Software (often called FOSS) is software (programs and applications) which is created using a non-commercial model. In other words, you can download it from the Internet for free, and some companies will supply it to you on CD or DVD for a small copying free (usually a few dollars).

How can this be? Is it crap?

Firstly, it's not crap. There are many very large companies—such as Sun Microsystems, Novell, Apple Computers and IBM—which provide FOSS to their customers as part of the packages they sell... and they're not going to supply anything to their customers which is going to give them a bad reputation.

In fact, the software which runs most of the webservers in the world, Apache, is FOSS. That's hundreds of thousands of web servers.

At Computer Troubleshooters - Bondi Junction we use both FOSS and commercial software (such as Micrsoft Office) all the time. If you'd like to learn more about FOSS, give us a call. In the meantime, here are some FOSS packages which might be of interest to you:

Open Office is, to a large extent, a free replacement for Microsoft Office. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software similar to PowerPoint.
Firefox is a web browser which can replace Internet Explorer. It provides tabbed browsing and, some people say, a nicer interface than Explorer.
Thunderbird is a very powerful email program. It handles multiple accounts at the same time, and is easy to use. We like it because it keeps email in files which are much easier to manage (such as move to a new computer) than Outlook.
GIMP is a powerful image editor. In many ways it's like Photo Shop, but without the heavy price tag
Audacity is an audio editor. You can use it for converting from one sound file format to another (such as WAV to MP3), for cutting and splicing audio files, and for adding special effects such as noise reduction, echo and fade to your sound files.
Linux. Instead of being just a FOSS program, Linux is the heart of an operating system. Just as Windows provides the foundation which you need to run programs such as Notepad, Calculator, Microsoft Office, and Internet Explorer; Linux provides a foundation for a whole swathe of programs. Indeed, there are many companies which assemble Linux and often hundreds of other programs into a "distribution" which can perform most, if not all, the functions a typical computer user would need.

There are many distributions, such as Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, and so on.