01 October 2008 Software Freedomhttp://www.derekcordeiro.com/2008/10/software-freedom.html Software Freedom day is celebrated worldwide on the 3rd Saturday of September 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software%20Freedom%20Day. But in Goa, it was celebrated at BITS Pilani, Goa Campushttp://www.bits-goa.ac.in/on the 27th(or was it a 2 day event?).

I have heard people define Free/Open Source Software time and again. There are endless discussions about which Open Source license is the best. One thing that should be known to all: Open Source Software is here to stay. Open Source even mentioned in textbooks e.g. Software Engineering books like Object-Oriented and Classical Software Engineering by Steven Schach. But what is the easiest way to adopt Free Software on your Desktop PC?

If you already use GNU/Linux or *BSD or Solaris, you already have a whole lot of free software already installed. You probably have very little non-free software. The only thing you can do to contribute is to help others(could be help new users, or help developers, etc). If you use Microsoft Windows or Mac, follow some easy steps.

Use Free Software as much as possible.

1. Firefox http://getfirefox.com/ /Chrome/Flock http://flock.com/ for browsing. 2. OpenOffice http://openoffice.org/ for good quality formatted text documents/spreadsheets/presentations.(at the time of writing, OpenOffice 3.0 RC3 is available) extra: Check out the openoffice extensions like the template packs I and II 3. Pidgin http://pidgin.im/ for Instant Messaging. 4. Thunderbird http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/ for email. 5. Free Developer tools like Eclipse http://eclipse.org/ , Netbeanshttp://netbeans.org/together with MinGW http://www.mingw.org/ /MSYS http://www.mingw.org/wiki/msys and free libraries like wxWidgets http://wxwidgets.org/ (If you know MFC, it is an excellent choice). 6. Java http://java.sun.com/ is mostly Free software, use it.

The most important thing though is not to discourage others from using it.(This goes out especially to fanboys who are pretty narrow minded). Sometimes I've heard people say that Linux sucks. I cannot disagree or agree -- Linux is far from perfect, but nothing really is perfect.(The same people say that Vista is awesome--I think Microsoft will not completely agree with that). Buzz up!http://buzz.yahoo.com/article/pub/http%253A%252F%252Fwww.derekcordeiro.com%252F2008%252F10%252Fsoftware-freedom.html ShareThis http://www.derekcordeiro.com/# Posted by Derek J C at 3:15:00 PMhttp://www.derekcordeiro.com/2008/10/software-freedom.html in freedom http://www.derekcordeiro.com/search/label/freedom 2 commentshttp://www.derekcordeiro.com/2008/10/software-freedom.html#comment-form http://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=2174257787047055345&postID=2571689009609058525 http://www.derekcordeiro.com