Free software... and why we avoid it.

Clive Webster, Barry Collins | Sep 22, 2006 4:13 PM

With the free products on our new cover DVD, you need never buy software again. So why do we still keep paying?

Open source software has finally come of age, and thousands of Australians are now benefiting from professional-looking programs that haven’t cost them a penny. Too good to be true? Most certainly not.

Whether you’re looking for an operating system, Internet browser or just a small anti-spyware utility, there’s almost certainly an open source program that fits the bill. You’ll find a selection of top-quality, open source software on the cover disc, and we review the best apps in this feature.

Not only is such software normally free of charge, it’s also free from the licensing restrictions that prevent people from adapting it. Consequently, programmers are given full access to the source code so they can tailor the software to their own needs, or make improvements or bug fixes that can be incorporated into forthcoming revisions of a particular program.

‘That ability to modify [the code] is one of its greatest merits,’ says open source enthusiast Matthew Braymiller. ‘One person can write a program to the best of his abilities, then a group of people can make it better by adding and improving features. As the program gains popularity, the potential developer base outgrows even the large commercial software companies.’

Yet despite the seemingly obvious advantages of open source programs, paid-for commercial software remains in the ascendancy. So why do we still pay for software when high-quality free alternatives are no more than a download away? Is open source plagued with support, security and reliability issues, or are we being duped by a commercial software industry desperate to cling on to its profit margins? This feature lifts the lid on all the reasons we still pay for software, and asks whether it’s time for a change in attitude. But first let’s consider how the open source movement came to be.Free software has been available since computing’s year dot. The Free Software Foundation, formed by the evangelical Linux co-creator Richard Stallman in 1985, formalised the concept of code that is ‘free as in free speech’ rather than ‘free as in free beer’. Yet the free software movement had an image problem.

Led by ‘the beard and sandals brigade’, its near-communist approach to software development scared off businesses, which still associated it with zero cost and thus zero professionalism.

Then in 1998, the free software movement changed its image. Netscape, which at the time was taking a battering from Microsoft in the infamous Internet browser wars, decided to make the source code of its Netscape Navigator browser freely available. But, in a crucial strategy meeting before the code was released, a team including the influential Eric S. Raymond – who just a year before had written an essay espousing community development of software – decided an image make over was necessary. The group rejected the ambiguous ‘free software’ moniker and instead opted for the more neutral ‘open source’ tag.

Raymond and the Netscape team overhauled the image of open source and made free software palatable to business. The Open Source Initiative, led by Raymond, sidelined the likes of the anti-capitalist, Microsoft-hating Stallman and openly embraced business, explaining the benefits of freely available code to big corporations and tempting software vendors into the open source tent. The open source movement had begun and, with a well-respected company such as Netscape on board, the bandwagon quickly gained momentum.

Within months, the likes of Intel, IBM and Netscape were pumping millions into the open source Linux variant Red Hat. The company floated in August 1999, and its market capitalisation is now at a staggering $5.5bn – not bad for a business selling software with no intrinsic value.

Now, as any IT manager will know, Linux is prevalent in the business community. ‘There is a very powerful, evolving open source movement,’ says Simon Moores, managing director of Zentelligence Research. ‘It’s moved
out of the beard and sandals to suits in corporations.’

Operating systems are just a part of the open source picture – over the past couple of years, demand for open source software that runs on Windows has rocketed. Firefox (a by-product of Netscape’s decision to go open source) now has about 10 percent of the Internet browser market, providing Microsoft’s Internet Explorer with some much-needed competition. In fact, Microsoft has craftily swiped tabbed browsing, one of Firefox’s most popular features, for Internet Explorer 7.

‘There’s no doubt in my mind that the IE 7 project is a direct result of the work we’ve done to provide people with a better Web experience through Firefox, and IE’s inclusion of Firefox features, from tabbed browsing to Web feed (RSS and others) support and pop-up blocking, is a validation of the pioneering, user-focused work we’ve done in building Firefox,’ said Asa Dotzler, co-founder of the Spread Firefox campaign, on his blog.

OpenOffice has also proved hugely successful over the past couple of years, with an estimated user base of more than 40 million. ‘At the start of 2005, the OpenOffice.org community set itself the target of having a market share of over 40 percent by 2010. Today, it looks as though we’re going to get there sooner,’ says John McCreesh, marketing project co-lead for OpenOffice.org.

Yet despite the impressive figures, analysts say open source software still has a mountain to climb in the consumer market. ‘If you talked to anyone down my street and asked them whether they want open source or Microsoft, they wouldn’t have heard of open source. On the consumer side, it’s non-existent,’ says Moores.

OpenOffice.org’s McCreesh acknowledges that open source still isn’t on most people’s radars. ‘The biggest barrier is that people don’t know there’s an alternative,’ he says. ‘Open source enthusiasts are aware of the problem. We need to get out of the ghetto – I need to be having this interview with a columnist for OK! magazine.’

Open source software, such as OpenOffice and the GIMP imaging suite, has also come under fire for stifling innovation by aping commercial products such as Microsoft Office and Adobe’s Photoshop respectively. ‘The trouble with OpenOffice and older versions of Office, which they emulate, is that they’re built to tackle last era challenges,’ says Nick McGrath, director of platform strategy at Microsoft.

‘Microsoft has been forced to delay the launch of Office 2007 so that it can introduce a new look and feel. I don’t hear users asking for this,’ counters McCreesh. ‘I do hear them complaining about the costs of having to go back to school to learn how to use Office all over again. Microsoft’s “innovation” is driven by a desire to look different from OpenOffice.org. That’s based on Microsoft’s need to make more profits, not because it benefits its users.’

Free software isn’t always open source, of course (in fact, the likes of Richard Stallman would argue that even open source isn’t free by his definition). Google, for example, has been particularly aggressive over the past 18 months in distributing desktop software free of charge. The Google Pack contains the Picasa photo album software, a desktop search application and the much-heralded Google Earth among other things.

Google funds the giveaways from advertising and marketing tie-ins within the products, and Moores claims this approach could win over consumers’ hearts quicker than open source. ‘People are becoming confident in Google as a brand and will start using its software,’ he says.

Team effort: there are dozens of developers behind the open source graphics software GIMP.

OpenOffice backers claim innovations in the design of Microsoft's Office 2007, such as the new Ribbon interface, have been driven by the desire to be different from OpenOffice.

So why do people still pay hundreds of dollars for commercial software when there’s so much free software out there? Virtually every category of paid-for software, from anti-virus to ZIP file unpackers, has a free alternative. Here, we analyse the traditional reasons why commercial software is still flying off the shelves, with opinions from genuine users and industry insiders.

Support
Free software is all well and good, but who do you turn to when things go wrong? That is the usual argument put forward by proprietary software vendors when challenged to justify their price tags. ‘Microsoft Office gives the user
a complete package that’s easy to install and use. It’s the same reason most people prefer to buy a fully assembled car rather than a kit-car. People simply want something they know works and has a mature support structure around it,’ says Microsoft’s McGrath.

Open source advocates claim the commercial firms have ulterior motives. ‘The commercial software world sees customer support primarily as a means of making more money,’ says OpenOffice’s McCreesh. ‘The typical commercial customer support experience is listening to call centre hold music on a premium rate support line. If you really want this kind of support for open source software, you can probably find companies who’ll sell it to you.’

Mark Carter, a computer programmer, also fails to see the advantage of the tech-support lines. ‘Support is an issue that’s vastly inflated by the likes of Microsoft,’ he says. ‘Many years ago, I encountered a bug in Microsoft Office. I phoned Microsoft to report it, and it wanted to charge me money. I was thinking: hold on, I’m reporting a bug, I’m certainly not going to pay money for the privilege.’

Open source support often is comprised of online forums manned by fellow users or volunteers or, in some instances, direct contact with the software developers themselves. ‘With a few rare exceptions, I’ve usually found freeware support, at least in the open source field, to be better than the support you get from the commercial software companies,’ says Braymiller. ‘You’re generally communicating with the developers who understand the workings of the program far better than some tech-support operator who’s reading from a script.’

Then there are companies such as Red Hat that essentially repackage Linux and justify charging a fee for the operating system by delivering the formal support structure that isn’t on offer from most free Linux variants.

But, ultimately, relying on open source support remains something of a gamble. There’s no fixed-term guarantee to support a product for its useful lifetime, as offered by many commercial firms. Yet as McCreesh claims: ‘You’re afraid to rely on volunteers? Well, I hope you never need to call out the lifeboat service or a mountain rescue team.’

That argument might wash with the curious consumer, but it’s unlikely to cut much ice with businesses, for which it would be suicidal to deploy software without any guaranteed support structure.

‘We’ve been talking to a number of large businesses, and support is still a big problem [for open source],’ says Chris Ingle, group analyst at IDC. ‘Large businesses are used to running mixed models on the servers, but on the clients it’s much more of an argument over increased support costs. People buying a computer at home are used to Microsoft. Some people argue support costs can triple when you install open source on desktops.’

Inertia
Man might climb a mountain ‘because it’s there’, but it seems we’re not so adventurous when it comes to software. People stick to what they know, because for non-techies, learning a new piece of software is a chore.

‘People often use what’s installed on their computer when they buy it, even though it may not be very good. Also, if they use Word or Excel at work, they’re in something of a comfort zone with those programs and will wish to use them on their home computer,’ says Gordon Gibson, a retired registrar of births, deaths and marriages, who installed freeware across all his local government office’s PCs when he was its chairman.

Microsoft, of course, fought a staggeringly expensive court case with the US Department of Justice to preserve its right to bundle software with Windows, presumably because it knows people rarely look elsewhere when they find something that works.

Businesses, too, are naturally reluctant to change. New software installations need to be tested with the company’s current hardware/software, employees need to be trained and tech-support calls will inevitably increase (initially at least) when new programs are installed on users’ desktops. IT managers will need to see some real business benefits of switching to open source.

The Google Pack, which includes the Picasa photo album software (pictured), has contributed to the changing perception of the value of software.

People are naturally suspicious when somebody they don’t know offers them something for free – little wonder with cons such as the Nigerian 419 scams just a click away. Most people haven't heard of even the best-known open source organisations such as Mozilla, and will be apprehensive to entrust sensitive data (such as email) to unknowns.

The fact that most open source software is downloaded over the Internet also brings into play another fear factor – many people will have had a run-in with malware on their system and may therefore wrongly associate any free downloads with nefarious activity. ‘Many of those who’ve come across freeware have had bad experiences with malware posing as freeware,’ claims Gibson. Even if it is unfair to tar open source and malware writers with the same brush, the once-bitten, twice-shy attitude is hard to combat. After all, not many people will have had their systems infected as a direct result of buying commercial software off the shelf in Harvey Norman.

Another reason people fear free software is, perversely, its price. People find it hard to understand how an office suite being given away online can possibly be as good as one costing hundreds of dollars. ‘People can’t believe software this good can be free,’ claims McCreesh. ‘Enthusiastic users are our best sales force – we say to people, if you love OpenOffice.org, cut a few CDs and give them to your friends and family. Leave CDs at the gym or hand them out at school.’

IDC’s Ingle agrees. ‘Open source product quality has improved a lot. Previous versions of OpenOffice, for example, were bloated and didn’t do much. OpenOffice 2 is now a perfectly good product and does exactly what the consumer needs it to do,’ he says.

Yet even open source advocates like Brian Thornton, who provides network management services to SMEs, admit there’s lots of chaff among the wheat. ‘Most open source projects are rubbish,’ he claims. ‘But it reflects the fact that of the 100,000 or so open source projects out there, the vast majority have either not delivered anything usable or have stalled without significant activity taking place.

‘There are, however, a small minority that have made great headway and gained a critical mass of interest and activity, to the point where they’ve delivered truly exceptional software that can compete with, and sometimes beat, anything on the commercial market.’

Thornton claims that the wealth of poor-quality projects shouldn’t deter people from trying open source, but that they need to be selective in their approach. ‘People wishing to run free software should be prepared to invest some time in trying out various free software offerings and in searching around to find the best ones for their purpose,’ he argues.

Security
Instinct may suggest that large software companies are in a better position to secure their software, but as Microsoft has found out many times to its cost, commercial and mass-market success also makes you a prime target for hackers.

Few doubt that Microsoft takes security seriously, but it’s indisputable that its products require more patches and bug fixes than any others. In its defence, Microsoft devotes significant money and effort to providing automatic product updates and service packs to keep disruption to a minimum. Yet it’s
a fortunate Windows user who hasn’t been infected by a virus at some point in their computing lifetime.

Security is one of the strongest cards in open source’s hand. There’s no doubt that PCs running a Linux OS are at far less risk, and similarly Windows PCs running open source applications are better protected to a degree.

Yet that isn’t to say open source is totally safe. Firefox developers have been forced to address several vulnerabilities in the past year, the most serious of which could have led to hackers taking control of vulnerable computers. As Firefox continues to grow in popularity, it will doubtless find itself the victim of more attacks. The days of hackers attacking Microsoft for ideological reasons have largely passed; now they want to extort credit card details and they’ll do it through whatever means necessary.

However, the open source movement has less reason to fear security flaws than its commercial counterparts. They don’t have to worry about the share price dropping through the floor if they announce a major security breach and can focus purely on finding a fix.

Big bird: Linux, with its penguin logo, is gaining momentum in the corporate arena.

Regular updates
Software developers have a vested interest in making sure they produce regular updates of their products – it keeps the money rolling in. Hence, we’ve had nine major versions of Adobe’s Photoshop since it first appeared in 1990 and several spin-off products including Photoshop Elements, which has had four iterations of its own.

You might occasionally question the worthiness of upgrade versions (PC Authority’s reviews team has criticised many down the years for unnecessary feature bloat) but, in general, they keep driving the evolution of software and ultimately help us do more with our computers.

And we’re not just talking about paid-for product updates or completely new products. Microsoft, for example, released a complete overhaul for Windows XP in 2004 when it launched Service Pack 2. Most XP users have now installed it and enjoy enhanced security and several new features.

Regular updates also offer an element of security: we can be fairly certain that Adobe isn’t going to shut up shop tomorrow and cancel all future development of Photoshop, so our long-term investment in the software is unlikely to go to waste. This is particularly important for businesses, which don’t want to be chopping and changing their software every year.

But can anyone make such guarantees about free software? If the programmers of Photoshop rival the GIMP decided they’d had enough and wanted to try something new, who’s going to build the new version? Adobe can hire new programmers if they leave – who replaces open source volunteers?

A visit to the GIMP developers’ website will answer those questions. There are dozens of people working on the software, with regular developers’ conferences and several national user groups. Only an unlikely mass exodus could seemingly derail the product’s development.

OpenOffice’s McCreesh also claims the lack of financial motivation results in better software. ‘Our development roadmap is user driven, not shareholder driven. If our users or developers come up with ways of making OpenOffice.org faster or easier or more usable, the OpenOffice.org community will adopt them enthusiastically,’ he says.

However, open source programmers can also suffer from a lack of discipline, working on new features rather than fixing old problems. ‘I believe the 2.6 [Linux] kernel is slowly getting buggier,’ Linux kernel maintainer Andrew Morton recently told the LinuxTag conference in Germany. ‘The presence of a bug affects the whole kernel process and can hold up the kernel, as there are bugs but no-one is fixing them.’

Total cost of ownership
When it comes to price, it’s pretty hard to beat free. But for businesses, the initial cost of the software licence is only part of the overall picture. There are deployment costs, training, technical support and contractual obligations to consider.

On this front, analyst Moores claims open source still has much work to do. ‘Big organisations are still reluctant to move to open source because TCO is yet to be proven. When you buy Microsoft, you can see X, Y and Z costs. Open source is very component based,’ he claims.

Yet Moores claims it’s starting to make progress in corporations. ‘We’ve been talking about open source since 1999. Mature products are becoming exciting and acceptable to much of the business market. It’s going upwards at a rate of knots.’

However, even if open source isn’t quite ready to elbow Microsoft out of big businesses, its effect on overall software prices has been marked, as you’ll see from the comparison opposite. It’s also making companies such as Microsoft look closely at their business pricing plans.

‘As the IT industry is ever-evolving, business models adapt accordingly. Certainly, the majority of software vendors will still profit from selling their software for the foreseeable future, but there’s also scope for alternative models, including subscription-based pricing,’ says Microsoft’s McGrath. Indeed, analysts are predicting a much more component-based pricing structure for Windows Vista, which will be launched to businesses later this year.

The rise of Linux has also given businesses extra bargaining power in negotiations with software vendors. ‘Large businesses will have a significant pilot of Linux before talking with Microsoft these days,’ says IDC’s Ingle. There’s nothing like a little blackmail to oil the wheels of negotiations, is there? But what about you? Could you survive on a diet of free, open source software? Turn over the page and see the 15 free tools PC Authority recommends. And send your thoughts to letters@pcauthority.com.au

Regular updates to products such as Adobe's Photoshop Elements drive the evolution of software, according to some. Others believe updates are merely a money-making exercise.

The cost of software has fallen considerably over the past decade. Let’s take a journey back to 1996 and examine the cost of the software you might expect to find installed on a typical PC.

Back then, you were paying around $1200 for the Office 95 suite, $1400 for the art and graphics package Corel Draw! 6, and Corel’s CD Creator 2 was about $550. Many people will have forgotten that in the mid-1990s we were still paying for Internet browsers, with the recommended Netscape Navigator 2 costing more than $100. And to protect yourself on the Net, you’d have needed PC Authority’s pick of the anti-virus packages, Dr Solomon’s Anti Virus Toolkit, which was sold for what now seems a pricey $300.

Those five pieces of software alone would have cost you just over $3500, which would have been enough to buy you a decent PC. And when you take inflation into account, which has risen by 29 percent since 1996 according
to the Retail Price Index, the total cost of that software in real terms is more than $4500.

Fast forward to 2006 and Microsoft Office (Professional Edition) now costs $600 less at $600; our recommended art package, Adobe Creative Studio, is the only stayer at $1400; and Nero 7 Premium CD-burning software is down to $140. The concept of paying for an Internet browser (with the possible exception of Opera) now seems ludicrous, and the price of anti-virus software has tumbled to $90 for ZoneAlarm: and that’s for a complete security suite. Overall, the total cost is $2230, which is $2270 less than 10 years ago in real terms.

There are many reasons why software prices have fallen, the biggest of which is the proliferation of PCs. Back in 1996, computers could barely be described as household objects; now they’re mass market and that naturally brings huge economies of scale.

Competition is also much fiercer in several sectors of the software market. In 1996, the majority of computers wouldn’t have been running anti-virus software; now it seems almost suicidal not to. Anti-virus has become a huge industry, with several big players competing with one another, and the introduction of Microsoft’s Windows OneCare is likely to increase competition in this market even further. Many expect security software to eventually be provided for free with Windows.

There are other, less obvious, examples of software becoming more affordable. In 1998, there was only one version of Adobe’s image-editing behemoth Photoshop, which then cost a princely $1600, placing it out of reach for the average consumer. Nowadays, Adobe has splintered the product so that the consumer-focused Photoshop Elements 4 (which contains many of its big brother’s advanced features) now costs just $137, while Creative Studio still caters for the professional market at $1397. The company also decided to give away its Photoshop Album Starter Edition software after digital camera makers and Google started to distribute similar software gratis.

There’s also some evidence to suggest that free open source software is dragging down the price of commercial products. Take Microsoft Office, which remained fairly consistently priced at about $1000-$1400, until it suddenly dropped to around $800 in 2003 – around about the same time Sun started heavily promoting Star Office (which subsequently evolved into OpenOffice). Open source isn’t solely responsible for the dwindling Office price tag, but it must be a factor.

There are clear signs that Microsoft is concerned that its traditional means of selling software are coming to an end. Analyst Simon Moores says the company is clearly rattled. 'Microsoft is looking for new opportunities [to earn revenue] and it’s doing it all the time,' he says, citing embedding adverts into Microsoft Word as one particular revenue stream the company might consider in the future.

Windows OneCare could drive down the cost of anti-virus software still further.

Increased competition has led to price drops from Microsoft: Office 95 cost over $1500 in today's prices; Office 2003 costs $600.

Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal
Keep spyware under control.

Ad-Aware is an effective and easy-to-use anti-spyware tool that won’t cost you a penny. It’s a slightly restricted version of Lavasoft’s paid-for product, but you get the same scanning engine and access to the same spyware definitions. As long as you download these manually and run the scan regularly, you’ll get a good level of protection.

There’s no realtime scanning so you still need to be careful about which buttons you click online, which sites you visit and what you download. But to counter this, Ad-Aware SE Personal has some interesting plug-ins to protect you from some of the more esoteric threats. The VX2 Cleaner gets rid of the nasty VX2 application, a notoriously difficult piece of spyware to kill. HexDump shows you a hexadecimal version of a suspect file found in a scan – code that usually contains handy information such as the source URL of the application. LSP Explorer scans outbound data to ensure a suspect LSP isn’t hijacking and rerouting outbound data.

It’s also worth going through the configuration menus carefully, as some options are turned off by default. You may want to enable scanning within archives to ensure backups aren’t infected, for example. You’ll find many greyed-out options here, but if you can do without premium features such as automated scans, updates and realtime protection then Ad-Aware SE Personal is a more than capable application.

Ad-Aware is king of the free anti-spyware apps.

Anti-spyware. REQUIRES: Windows 98 onwards INTERNET www.lavasoft.com Rating 4

SpamBayes
A powerful spam filter and email client that can learn.

A powerful spam filter for any email client that learns your preferences, SpamBayes automatically assesses and rates incoming mail, and anything that scores too highly is immediately moved to the Junk Email folder, while medium-scoring mail goes straight into Junk Suspects.

Part of SpamBayes’ charm is that it doesn’t come with any pre-defined rules. This is both a strength and a weakness, the downside being that it has to learn these rules based on your preferences and choices. However, after a few weeks of use, SpamBayes will be configured to block most nuisance emails.

Even after a few days, we didn’t see many genuine emails turning up in the Email Junk folder, while most spam did. And the process of training SpamBayes is fairly easy. The small toolbar has a Delete as Spam button to quickly tell SpamBayes to remove the offending item.

The Training section under the SpamBayes Manager section of the drop-down menu is also helpful. Here, you point the tool at your genuine emails and your spam folder, and from these examples it will quickly learn what’s acceptable and what’s not.

With a bit of effort, you can even get SpamBayes working with most POP3 email clients – see the FAQs on the website for details. In Outlook Express, for example, SpamBayes can add text to the subject line (SBSpam, for instance) and you can create a rule to move any mails with this text to the Spam folder.

SpamBayes can be used with most email clients, including Outlook Express

Anti-spam. REQUIRES Windows 98 onwards INTERNET spambayes.sourceforge.net Rating 5

Grisoft AVG Free Edition
Sophisticated and fully featured anti-virus suite.

AVG Free Edition has everything you could ever want from an anti-virus suite, with its various functions putting some paid-for anti-virus products to shame. Everything from daily virus definition updates to an email scanner are included.

The Resident Shield scans your files for malicious code in real-time, while the Email Scanner scans not only your incoming mail but everything that leaves your outbox too. It has a number of advanced configuration options, allowing you to do everything from only scanning emails with attachments to removing attachments with certain extensions.

As befits a powerful modern virus checker, AVG Free Edition can check for updates and perform a complete scan with the new definitions daily. If you’re not online when the virus definition update is scheduled, your computer will be updated the next time you go online.

Living with AVG Free Edition is easy; it won’t steal all the resources of the host PC, so once the updates are complete (they usually only take a few seconds over a reasonable broadband connection) you’re free to get on with whatever you like. With scheduled downloads, scans and powerful search algorithms, it’s a fine choice for your home PC.

AVG free edition includes daily virus definition updates

Anti-virus. REQUIRES Windows 98 onwards INTERNET www.grisoft.com Rating 5
Mozilla Thunderbird
An advanced email client with deep customisation potential.

The Mozilla Foundation has done more than any other to make switching from Microsoft for Web browsing and email a painless procedure. Its competitor to Internet Explorer – Firefox (see below) – accounts for more than 10 percent of the browser market, while Thunderbird is proving a feasible alternative to Outlook.

Switching to Thunderbird is quick and easy. It will import your account details and emails so you’re ready to go within minutes, and you’ll have little trouble finding your way around, as the interface is very similar to Outlook.

Thunderbird offers all of the features you’d expect from an email application, including support for IMAP and POP3 protocols, plus the ability to display HTML-formatted emails. It has a built-in RSS feed aggregator so you can keep up to date with worldwide events, and there’s a real-time spellchecker to avoid embarrassing typos.

The security features also impress, with the advanced message filtering particularly useful. S/MIME support, message encryption, digital signing and support for certificates all protect against nuisance emails, and there’s a built-in spam filter that works in conjunction with any anti-spam service your ISP may run.

And as a Mozilla project, Thunderbird is eminently customisable, with skins and extensions galore listed on www.mozilla.org/thunderbird.

Thunderbird is a superb alternative to Outlook and making the switch is simple.

Email client REQUIRES Windows 98 onwards INTERNET www.mozilla.org Rating 6

Mozilla Firefox
Firefox’s tabs and 1000+ extensions compete strongly with IE.

Firefox’s tabbed browsing and more than 1000 extensions make it
a strong competitor to Internet Explorer. Firefox is an amazingly flexible, clean and easy-to-use Web browser. The tabbed browsing alone has been enough to persuade many people to switch from Internet Explorer (this in turn has helped convince Microsoft to offer the feature in IE7, which is now at Beta 2 stage). However, Firefox has many more tricks to encourage you to ditch IE.

The side menu can be used to great effect to display all sorts of handy information, from IE favourites like Bookmarks and History to RSS newsfeeds via downloaded extensions. These extensions are key to Firefox’s popularity, with more than 1000 available at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox. All let you add features or tweak Firefox for a fully personalised Web browser with plenty of handy extras. The flexibility that the Firefox community has added is staggering; it’s a shining example of the strengths of the open source software design philosophy.

Among our favourite extensions is Tabbrowser Preferences, which groups all the tab-related preferences so you can customise your browsing quickly.

Other extensions worth a look are Wizz RSS, a useful RSS feed aggregator, and Flashblock, which stops Flash animations until you click on them. Then there’s the Gmail Space extension, which allows you to use your Gmail account as an FTP site, or Nuke Anything Enhanced to remove unwanted items from a page before printing. With Firefox extended properly, you can browse more efficiently than with any other Web browser.

Browse comfortably with extensions to block adverts, view RSS feeds and more.

Web browser REQUIRES Windows 98 onwards INTERNET www.mozilla.org Rating 6

Zone Labs ZoneAlarm
One of the best firewalls around.

The free version of ZoneAlarm is based on the same firewall engine used by the $52 ZoneAlarm Pro. The paid-for version does include some useful extras – like the OS Firewall – but many of its features, such as the anti-spyware utility and pop-up blocker, can be performed by other free utilities, including the ones we review in this feature.

The firewall and program control are core to the product and very easy to use. When using the firewall, you have two sliders to adjust – Internet Zone and Trusted Zone – which let you set a standard level of paranoia for traffic over the Internet and over your home LAN. The High level is recommended for Net traffic, with the medium setting suggested for traffic travelling across the home network.

The Program Control module works in much the same way. The setting is at medium by default, which means that every application will ask you for permission before connecting.

You can also get into the mechanics of assigning ports easily enough with the help of the online manual. It’s also fairly easy to add PCs to a Trusted Zone or Blocked Zone to either circumvent the firewall when connecting to trusted known computers or to completely block any access to PCs you’d rather not be associated with. ZoneAlarm is widely regarded as the best of the free firewalls.

Firewall REQUIRES Windows 2000
or XP INTERNET www.zonelabs.com Rating 5

A free personal firewall to keep hackers at bay.

AbiWord
A simple alternative to Microsoft’s Word.

AbiWord boasts some sophisticated tools in an intuitive package that looks somewhat similar to Microsoft’s dominant Word app. The interface is clean, while the style of the menus is mimicked from Word so their contents are familiar. You’re unlikely to find yourself scratching your head while trying to find the right tool or option.
Text can be easily wrapped around pictures, tables are easily set up and edited, and you can mail merge too. In fact, with AbiWord doing all of the regularly used functions of Word, it’s a feasible alternative for word processing for those that can live without all the powerful but rarely used features offered by Microsoft.
And it’s a good choice if you use different OSes, as AbiWord was designed with multi-OS support in mind – there’s a Mac OS X version, and porting from the source code is easy. Furthermore, documents are saved with XML markup so they’re readable in any document viewer.
Anyone who decides to make the switch to AbiWord should have no trouble opening old files – the tool copes well with importing Word documents, and the few formatting and style errors are quickly rectified.
Also on the disc is a dictionary plug-in, as well as the Import/Export and Tools plug-ins. The latter has all sorts of handy extras like a thesaurus and text translator. See www.abisource.com for more details.

The simple interface provides everything most people need from a word processor.

Word processor. REQUIRES Windows 98 onwards INTERNET www.abisource.com Rating 5

OpenOffice
An impressively usable and flexible office suite.

OpenOffice has been a PC Authority favourite for some time and boasts an impressive collection of alternatives to Microsoft Office. The word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc) and presentation (Impress) modules form the highlights, but they’re ably assisted by the database and drawing tools. They can all import Microsoft-formatted files with ease, and can be set to export in Microsoft native file formats too.
We found Writer impressive at importing even the most convoluted of documents: our complex composite image comprising tiled GIFs overlaid by markers, shaded boxes and a wide range of font and paragraph styles appeared exactly as we’d created it in Word.
Calc is a powerful spreadsheet app, but it works slightly differently to Excel, with the conditional formatting tool a good example. Excel integrates both the Rule and the Style when creating a conditional format to, for example, turn negative numbers red. Calc, on the other hand, insists you have the Style pre-defined and then applies that to a Rule.
Impress copes well with PowerPoint presentations, making no formatting or transition errors with our gaudy test presentation. There are 51 entrance and exit settings separated into three easily understood categories, and a healthy selection of motion paths to compensate for not being able to define your own.
Add to these impressive modules a database that’s fully conversant in MySQL and Access formats, and many people could easily ditch Microsoft Office with no loss to their productivity.

An impressively usable and flexible office suite.

Office suite. REQUIRES Windows 98 onwards INTERNET www.openoffice.org Rating 6

DeepBurner
Burn to DVD and design disc covers for free.

While Windows XP does have a disc-burning utility, it only lets you burn data CDs. DeepBurner, on the other hand, will burn data to DVD, create an audio CD and also make a disc from an ISO image. These functions alone make it useful, but there’s even more to be had from this versatile free application.
DeepBurner hasn’t got a flashy interface with metallic effects and funky buttons. It has a clean design, which reflects its frugal use of resources. Similarly, it doesn’t baffle you with pointless options; the main screen merely asks if you want to burn a data disc, a music disc or create a replica disc from an ISO image (an entire disc image in a file storage format).
Adding files is simple: you have the tree branch diagram to show your files to the left, a standard Explorer-type file search and the main window to drag and drop files into. To the far left, you’ll see the real secrets of DeepBurner: the Autorun and Print Label buttons. Autorun lets you construct a basic browser for your disc that runs the moment it’s inserted. Meanwhile, the Print Label function allows you to add
a professional touch. Typically, a label print function is merely that; you put some pictures on a circle and send it to your printer. DeepBurner does this, but also has templates for booklets and cases for both CD and DVD formats.
With customisable buttons and free-form design, DeepBurner adds something special to your discs.

Disc burner. REQUIRES Windows 98 onwards INTERNET www.deepburner.com Rating 6

Create labels for both disc and sleeve.

Audacity
A flexible and powerful audio-editing suite.

You’d expect even a mediocre audio-editing suite to cost
a hefty sum, but Audacity is huge in its scope and is absolutely free. It’s handy for cutting out those massive periods of silence on ‘secret tracks’ and powerful enough to adjust volume levels, introduce panning effects and label key points on tracks for easy editing.
Anyone who’s used an audio-editing tool will find Audacity incredibly easy to use. For example, load up a standard stereo track and the two channels have their own waveforms, left and right. Now it’s easy if you want to add that panning effect, as you can select a portion of one channel and use the Envelope tool to change the volume to silent and back.
The Effect menu hides a bountiful list of tools to tweak and enhance the quality of your audio track. This applies to audio you’ve created as well as audio you’ve ripped, with the Import Raw Data command in the Project menu able to import tracks of most file types. There are some standard tools in the Effect menu for things like enhancing bass and changing pitch, tempo and speed, but there are plenty of advanced tools to play with too.
Among the more interesting advanced editing tools is Noise Removal. Using this, Audacity can sample a noise and remove it from the whole track. Once done, you can export the audio as WAV, Ogg Vorbis or MP3 (for MP3 exporting you need the LAME codec, and to point Audacity to lame_enc.dll).

Get the most out of your audio with the multifaceted Audacity.

Audio editor. REQUIRES Windows 98 onwards INTERNET audacity.sourceforge.net Rating 6

Ambient Design ArtRage
Not only a competent art program, but a lesson in good design.

ArtRage is not just Microsoft’s Paint with a fancy Mac OS X interface: the paint used in ArtRage looks like the real stuff, and the brushes and tools on offer put Microsoft’s app to shame.
To the bottom left are the brushes and tools, with everything from crayon and chalks to oils and a trowel to choose from. Unfortunately, some are disabled in the free version, but there were still enough for our resident artist to paint the picture on the right quickly and easily.
Part of this ease of use is down to the interface, which is a lesson in sublime design. The layout of the tool and colour palette is not only attractive, but clear, intuitive and superbly functional. Most useful is the way they temporarily hide themselves when you paint nearby.
The feeling of actually painting on your PC is completed with the realistic paint modelling: grab the oil brush and move it around to charge an area with a lot of paint. Then you can pick up the trowel and move this blob of paint around. Paint merges with other colours, and even the brush stroke marks are shown and lead to differences in how colours blend.
ArtRage has an advantage over canvas in that mediums such as chalk and oil can be mixed however you like on the same piece. And while it comes into its own with a stylus and touchscreen, using
a mouse is still a lot of fun and gives great results.

An easy-to-use painting application that produces incredibly realistic results.

Painting app. REQUIRES Windows 2000
or XP INTERNET www.ambientdesign.com Rating 5

The GIMP
A deservedly popular alternative to Photoshop.

The GIMP is one of the prime examples of what the open-source community can achieve. After more than ten years of tweaking, there’s everything you’d want from an image-editing suite, from drawing tools to advanced filters.
The image-manipulation tools are impressive in their range and easily
a match for those of Photoshop. The GIMP was quick to follow Adobe in adding Layers, and now working with them is straightforward. For example, to remove nasty noise artefacts, take a photo and remove the colour, then open the same photo as a new layer and add a subtle Gaussian blur. Combine the two and you have a sharp, less noisy image.
You could also use a second layer with enhanced brightness and a touch of Gaussian blur, which, when combined with the original photo, gives a more saturated and stunning image. You could also add some film grain, perhaps to a 3D model that looks too perfect.
This is only touching on the power and flexibility of The GIMP; the tools are just too many to mention. But don’t worry about being overwhelmed by the features, as the open source community has a big trick up its sleeve in the form of extensive documentation. Without the sites www.gimp.org/tutorials and http://docs.gimp.org/en, many of the features of The GIMP would remain dormant.

Photo editor. REQUIRES Windows 2000
or XP INTERNET www.gimp.org Rating 5

All the power of Photoshop for free.

FoxEditor
A flexible, neat and powerful plain text HTML editor.

A flexible, neat and powerful plain text HTML editor FoxEditor is a small HTML editor with a raft of tools put together in a logical fashion. Across the top of the window are a handful of buttons, all painstakingly created to be aesthetically pleasing while obvious as to their function.
These buttons provide quick access to handy tools like the special ReadMode, which temporarily hides some of the redundant code and makes the font easier on the eye. It’s useful for when you’re trawling through a large chunk of code looking for errors. Then there’s the View as HTML button so you can look at your page as it would appear to a user.
As well as speeding up your work, there are a few extras for making your life easier. The Open/Save dialog is extended to list your favourite folders and has a preview pane to let you look at the code within a file before opening it. There’s also support for many cryptographic algorithms so you can construct secure sites.
It offers a multifaceted search dialog, and you can search for anything you like, with regular expressions and case sensitivity on offer. There’s also syntax highlighting for most of the popular formats, including HTML, Pascal and C++. Add to this the autocomplete function and you should be coding at lightning speeds.
The only drawback is no mouse-based construction, but if you’re a proficient coder FoxEditor is a handy tool to have on your PC.

FoxEditor has plenty of tools to get you coding at speed.

Html editor. REQUIRES Windows XP INTERNET foxeditor.sourceforge.net Rating 4

Apache HTTP Server
The most popular server around.

An essential inclusion in any roundup of free software, the Apache HTTP Server is the most popular piece of Web server software on the planet, outstripping installations of Microsoft’s competitor IIS (Internet Information Services).
Apache’s popularity isn’t simply down to its stability and security: it’s also extendable via third-party module plug-ins, which are largely free.
In most cases, Apache is used in combination with the two standard plug-ins, the PHP language for dynamic page generation (www.php.net) and MySQL for database support (www.mysql.com). The additions allow you to create industrial-strength, database-driven dynamic websites for no financial outlay whatsoever.
The downside of all this power is that configuring Apache is largely a manual process, requiring you to edit the
httpd.conf file for setting up file paths and so on. The good news is that it’s largely secure by default, so once you’ve set the basic DocumentRoot attribute you don’t have to worry about locking the server down in the way you might have to with a Microsoft system. That said, before you go live with a critical site, it pays to thoroughly familiarise yourself with httpd.conf and its settings. The file is well documented to help you along.
Apache is over a decade old and still in very active development – we’ve included the latest 2.2 version on the cover disc – and being that it’s used to power around 70 percent of the world’s websites it’s probably one of the best-tested pieces of software on the planet when it comes to robustness and protection against attack.

Apache is used on more Web servers than Microsoft's IIS.

Web server. REQUIRES Windows 98 onwards INTERNET www.apache.org Rating 5

PDFCreator
Create Adobe PDFs files for free.

PDFCreator isn’t a separate word processor/DTP package with strange new buttons and menu layouts to learn; it works with every document-creation application available. It acts like a printer, so all you need do is open whichever file you want in whichever app you want and go to the Print menu. Select PDFCreator as your printer in the menu and then hit Print.
You’re presented with a metadata tagging screen for the fledgling PDF file, and simply hitting save will create your PDF in a few seconds. However, it’s well worth taking a look at the numerous options beforehand.
Even the first page holds an interesting button named Integrate into Shell. With this enabled, you can now convert files to PDF with a right-click rather than having to open them and go through the print process described above. The PDF options panels are full of goodies such as auto-rotating pages and setting the compression levels of
text and images.
PDFCreator can also output files in a number of picture formats, including TIFF and JPEG. It will also let you specify the quality in DPI and the colour depth. It’s a handy option if you want to use
a document as a picture for your website, or in a fussy DTP package. With so much on offer, PDFCreator is invaluable.

Create PDFs from any document-making apllication.

Pdf generator. REQUIRES Windows 98 onwards INTERNET sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator Rating 6

This article appeared in the October, 2006 issue of PC Authority.