"Find A Computer A Home": Open Source Software
What Is Open Source Software?
A quiet revolution is taking place around the world in the computer software industry. Instead of writing software for purely commercial reasons and with restrictive, expensive licenses, thousands of (often) volunteer programmers have been writing wonderful software under the General Public License (GPL), which fosters the concept of Open Source Software and of community.
Open Source software is usually free of charge, readily obtained via the Internet, is often more secure than closed-source software and fosters community improvement because the source code is freely available to anyone to improve upon. Examples of well known open source software are: Linux Operating systems, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Apache, Abiword, The Gimp and many others. Virtually every computer application you can dream of needing has free, open source software available to you. Also, much of it has also been compiled to run on closed source systems such as Windows or Apple computers.
What Is Linux?
The largest example of open source software is the GNU/Linux operating system. Linux is an operating system (OS) while GNU provided many of the tools and applications to make it useful. An OS is the software which enables a user to interact with the computer hardware. Linux is considered by many computer experts to be more powerful than Microsoft Windows and more stable and secure when using the Internet. Most importantly it is free!
At Find A Computer A Home it has been our policy since early 2006 to provide the Linux operating system on all computers we donate. We do this for the following reasons:
- Microsoft Windows licenses cost anywhere from $60-250 for each computer. We cannot afford this for computers that we give away free.
- Microsoft Windows has serious security issues. Some of the MS Windows computers used by our clients have become so infected with malware and viruses as to be unusable.
- we are able to provide more secure, stable and useful software for our clients
- installing Linux and all the software is much easier and less error prone than installing MS Windows
As with anything there are some disadvantages to using Linux:
- normally you cannot run software designed for MS Windows under Linux - you must use a Linux equivalent program
- most clients would be more familiar with Windows so some re-learning must be done, but it is minimal
- Linux may not connect to the latest hardware gadgets as easily as MS Windows
What is in it for Me to be a Linux user?
Most new computers purchased at retail outlets include either Microsoft Windows or Mac OSX and about $60-$200 of the overall cost of your new system goes towards purchasing that OS license. Office Suites, graphics, multimedia or security software are an additional cost over and above the OS cost.
Open Source Software enables FACAH to provide you with a complete system: a fully working, Internet ready computer that has literally hundreds of pre-installed software applications. As the user of such a system you can take heart in the fact that you are contributing to a growing base of satisfied computer owners who are using software that has been written by a community of often unpaid volunteers who write software because they love doing so, not simply for pay.
Using a recycled computer is environmentally friendly.