How I saved over $4000 on software?

Is the “free software” revolution a myth or a temporary trend? I don’t think so. Being a technology evangelist myself, who’s been involved in software usage & construction for over 10 years, I feel that “free software” has a tremendous potential (both a consumer model as well as a business model). Having said that, not all software can be free, due to architecture or implementation constraints.

Anyways, while setting up my new laptop, I had an intriguing idea. Why not consider installing all/most non-commercial software to cater to all my daily computing needs? After a bit of thinking I realized that I already use some free or open-source software accounting to about 40-50% of all my personal software installations. So I took the plunge to make that figure escalate to around 90%.

My laptop came with a pre-installed licensed copy of MS Windows XP MCE so I thought of keeping the OS intact (without going the Linux way) since most of my practical needs revolve around Windows. For my application development needs, I already had an MSDN copy of MS Visual Studio .NET so I kept it as well. Besides these two products, I revamped nearly all software installations on my laptop with free or open-source, yet stable, software products. Eventually I saved upto $4000 in the purchase of software products. Besides, why indulge in software hacking, cracking or piracy when you can have alternatives to commercial software that can save you some serious money.

So here’s a nifty matrix I made depicting & comparing the commercial versus free/open-source software assets I reviewed as part of my revamping process.

All prices are in USD and are averaged from multiple price values (if available). The prices of the commercial software referenced in this review are based on the price of most basic starter editions as found on Froogle or respective vendor websites.

Other Freeware Recommendations:

These are actual free/open-source alternatives that I use in my daily work. For even more open source alternatives you can checkout OSAlt.com

In Part 2 of this article I’ll investigate the free/open-source software model. How it works? How does free/open-source software add value to the IT ecosystem as well as poses a threat to commercial software developers/vendors? What are the benefits and pitfalls of using free/open-source software products for the end-user? And how do/can vendors generate revenue from distributing free/open-source products?

Update: You can also get TheOpenCD, which is a collection of high quality Free and Open Source Software (like OpenOffice, Gimp, Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim etc.), all in one package. TheOpenCD can be downloaded or purchased (at minimal charges). I ordered one through OSBasket.com for under US $4. I basically wanted to install OpenOffice from it. The delivery got delayed because of holidays in between. The CD worked well, but the delivery packaging was a bit crude. Anyway’s, what more to ask for $4.