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The Best Things in Life Are Free by Jeff Martin

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The Best Things in Life Are Free by Jeff Martin Administration | Column The Best Things in Life are Free by Jeff Martin he best things in life are free. Love, respect, software developers.) Every water utility should be Tfriendship, family, forgiveness, down-home aware of the savings opportunity, tight budget or not. goodness, and grandma’s apple pie cannot be The challenge is that offers of free software can include purchased. Even the Beatles sang “Can’t Buy Me Love.” great value, but other times often include great danger These blessings can only be given. and a hefty price. Yet what about all the ‘free’ offers today? Can they be Many offers of free software are truly a dangerous trusted? Free vacations (with a 90-minute time-share hook covered with bait. The free or low cost software presentation)? Free samples at the grocery store? Free promises a solution, but in the end the promise magazine subscriptions? Free websites like www. conceals a hidden agenda. At the worst, ‘malware’ is freecycle.org and www.craigslist.org? Free classified software that secretly contains a virus that is designed ads? Free shipping? Free money? Free education? to harm, steal information, or even take your computer Ultimately nothing is free for someone somewhere is hostage for a ransom. There is also ‘adware’ which paying the bottom line. I only remember one thing may provide the promised software function, but also from high school economics, “TANSTAAFL” was requires the viewing of advertisements. Some ‘adware’ posted above the door. “There ain’t no such thing as a is actually respectable and so this is not necessarily a free lunch.” Beware the hook beneath the bait! show stopper. However, other ‘adware’ is rude and may even prevent you from uninstalling the software. Yet, one free resource worth serious consideration for water utilities is free and open source software. (Free There are a few simple precautions that will help you and open source software are both free, but open source avoid the pitfalls so that you can still take advantage of software also makes the ‘source code’ available to other the great value that is available. 48 KEYSTONE TAP SUMMER 2017 Column | Administration • Only download software from trusted websites licensed as open such as http://download.cnet.com and https:// source and gave away. sourceforge.net. These two well-known sources, They wanted a better The Best Things among others, check for viruses. Operating System and • Confirm your software choices with a trusted I.T. their system became professional. known as ‘Linux’ and is now the foundation • Check the download statistics for the software. of 66% of web servers in Life are Free Free software used by thousands of people is more worldwide! Linux is trustworthy that software used by hundreds. even making inroads • Read independent software reviews from trusted to the desktop market websites owned by legitimate companies. Beware because it is free and that ‘malware’ creators may even create fake review many feel it is better. websites to advertise their ‘malware’. So what does this • Update all your anti-virus software before installing mean? This means any new software and test the new software on that even more of the one computer first before installing it on all your best things in life are computers. truly free! I use Open Source software every day and You might further question why any free software could my own favorite list includes: be trusted. After all, “There ain’t no such thing as a free • Word Processing+, http://www.openoffice.org lunch,” so why should a free lunch be trusted? What • Scan to Print, http://icopy.sourceforge.net valid motives could software developers actually have for giving software away for free? Actually there are • Anti-Virus Protection, http://www.avast.com some very interesting and useful motives that explain • Media Conversion, http://www.dvdvideosoft.com the popularity of the open source movement and • Photo Editing, http://www.gimp.org free software. Perhaps the simplest to understand is ‘adware.’ Software companies give their software away • Web Browser and Email, http://www.mozilla.com and make a profit selling ads. TV networks make their • PDFs, http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator money the exact same way. However, more difficult • Zip / Unzip, http://peazip.sourceforge.net to understand, but even more successful are the free and open source software projects that are totally and • Backup, http://www.2brightsparks.com completely free for us the user! • FTP Client, http://winscp.net Sun Microsystems funded the development of Open • HTML Editor, http://kompozer.net Office, a totally free replacement for Microsoft Office, • Content Management System, https://drupal.org and made the decision to give the software away in 2001. They wrote the software to escape the premiums Maybe there is something we can learn from the success they were paying Microsoft and they gave it away to of free and open source software in our personal lives increase the user base and further improve the software and even in the water industry. For further reading for a huge win. Read the Open Office ‘Birthday Story’ check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open- here http://www.openoffice.org/editorial/ec13Oct. source_software and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ html. Check out the Open Office usage here https:// The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar. wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_ Email me with questions about your software! S Deployments. Entire countries and corporations have turned to Open Office to save expense. Linus Torvalds, unknown to many, is one of the founding fathers of the Open Source movement, https:// Jeff Martin en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds. He with the Controller help of a few at first and many more later actually built I.T. Specialist a computer operating system that they permanently [email protected] SUMMER 2017 KEYSTONE TAP 49.
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