Free and Functional | Online

With close to 90% software market share, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office are still the de facto standards for personal and business computing. However, free software is quickly raising its quality to give the consumer softwares a run for their money. There is now a plethora of quality yet free replacements for almost any proprietary software. In many cases, these alternative softwares are much better and reliable than their proprietary counterparts. Who said the best things in life aren't free?

One may not realize it, but there is probably a free software replacement for every software program one uses - office suite, photo editor, film editor, 3D modeling software and even the operating system per se. "The free software is not low-quality in any form. It is lovingly made by an individual or a community of developers who love to code, and want to share their creation with the world," says Subir Pradhanang, President, Free and Open Source Software Community Nepal (FOSSCN).

The major highlight of Free software is that it's free, in all its form. There aren't any catches like advertisements, forced registration or installation of spyware that come with some software. "Free software is an expression of programming freedom. It's not 'free' as in 'free food and beer' provided during product launches," Subir says, "When a software suite is free, it is free in all its entirety from its coding to the way it's used."

Begin the hunt
One of the beauties of free software is that it usually has a strong user base. Users sincerely report any bugs found and the programmers fix them in the subsequent versions. Another benefit of free software is that it can be installed in as many computers as one desires. Bal Krishna Bal, Project Manager, Madan Puraskar Pustkalaya says, "Unlike proprietary software, license doesn't compel or obviate people to use the software for specific purpose."

There are many ways to find free software. The best way to find free software is to do a search on websites like Fresh Meat (http://freshmeat.net) and Source Forge
(http://sourceforge.net/). Online directories such as DMOZ (http://dmoz.org), search engine like Google (http://google.com), and online forums are also a good resource to hunt for freebies. In addition, FOSSCN has been running a group on google (http://groups.google.com/group/foss-nepal) to share ideas on free and open source software.

Try it out
Before trying out the new piece of software one should check out whether the particular free software is truly free. "Freeware isn't always free software. Some 'freeware' programs contain advertisements or spyware programs which can be malicious to the system," says Subir. It is always advisable to google the program and look what others think about the program.

The transition to using a free software alternative is fairly easy and quick, not adding the download time for the software that is. One of such software is OpenOffice. With an interface similar to its proprietary counterpart MS Office, OpenOffice has all the features MS-Office has and then some. Another good alternative is Koffice for Linux. If you are looking for a replacement for Word alone then AbiWord (http://abiword.org), a very light-weight application at just 5MB in size, is worth downloading. When it comes to replacing just Excel, Gnumeric (http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/) and Sharp Tools Spreadsheet (http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/sharptools/) are good contenders. They both have considerably great features and even work on multiple platforms.

"These programs are an excellent replacement for proprietary software, and should be considered before spending the big bucks on proprietary counterparts," says Hempal Shrestha, Program Officer, Bellanet Asia. Thanks to the free distribution of the software as well as its programming source code, a wide variety of customization can be done to such programs further increasing its specialization and features. "Because of this advantage, we have able of localize OpenOffice with a Nepali interface and a Nepali dictionary for Nepalinux", shared Hempal, who is also involved in developing NepaLinux, an all Nepali Linux distribution.

With an interface like Access, Kexi (http://kexi-project.org) can be a handy application for database. Thunderbird (http://getthunderbird.com) or Evolution (http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/) can be a better replacement for tradition Outlook that is bundled with Windows. Mozilla Firefox is also one of best internet browsers available and is both highly customizable and considerably faster. Audio editors may swear on the power of Cool Edit pro but the versatility of the free alternative Audacity will also be undeniable to even the hardened of purists.

In the end
Free software is available to fulfill your every computing need, and for free. "It is now proved that free software is a viable alternative even for corporate clients," Hempal adds.

It's also possible to take free software to the next level by using a free operating system such as GNU/Linux. If you're just starting, you can try Nepal's very own operating system NepaLinux 2.0 (http://nepalinux.org), which doesn't even require hard drive installation and is useable from its CD interface.

May free software spice up your digital life, happy computing!