Freeware vs expensive software – what gets your click?

There are ways to get “free” software too

I have an old computer and I admit that I do have pirated software running on it. However, these are all older versions of the products that are compatible with my PC, any newer versions trash my PC and I need to rebuild. I have been upgrading that PC for years yet the time is close for a new one.

Once I upgrade (to what I am currently unsure) I will buy out of the box software and I will not use freeware. Seeing as I only use my PC for music production, I may end up getting a MAC and so I’ll have to religiously pay for everything anyway.

Freeware not only saves consumers money. It provides a means by which developers can move on to create a career for themselves. We should encourage this opportunity for entrepreneurism.

As I understand with freeware is that any contribution is entirely up to you. If the small print says you have to pay the onus is on the developer to build in to the product something that forces you to pay (i.e. a limited trial). I can’t imagine any developer putting in the small print that you must pay for the service and then release software without any restrictions. Normally, the only restrictions are that it must be for personal use only.

Freeware I use: Avira for a/v, Firefox, Malwarebytes, Winzip, NitroPDF, GOM Player. So far, no problems in using them. Did have Superantispyware but it slowed my laptop down (I’m on Vista, what do you expect…) so uninstalled it.

For Office, my employers installed Office 2003 on my laptop. Then they gave me a laptop with Office 2007. 2003 looks rather dated by comparison. I will consider buying Office 2007 but can someone explain why we pay more for it in the UK?

We should be grateful to everyone who has been involved in developing Web browsers for us to use free of charge. In the early days there were some paid-for offerings but thanks to the enthusiasm of Web developers free browsers remain available.

My employer provides me with Microsoft Office 2011 but when I retire I will probably move to OpenOffice, which is free. I’ve never paid Microsoft a penny (of my own money) and I’m not going to start now.

If you want to see an over the top example of Terms and Conditions (thankfully not real). You can watch South Parks HumanCentiPAD episode. Which is all about clicking accept to Terms and Conditions that very few people bother to read.

From my experience in my career in computing starting in 1964 on mainframes the first thing to do with any home computer is to reduce to a minimum the space taken on the hard drive by the installed operating system (usually Microsoft) and install a FOSS operating system. These systems normally include the popular types of software (office, photography, email and social) besides having access to the repositories holding certified copies of FOSS packages which cater for almost any requirement.

From this point on – especially with those os distributions which implement the sudo user – one no longer needs to consider accidental acquisition of malware nor of regular “defragging” nor of “registry” cleaning and optimisation programs (free or not). They are simply not required (except to protect any friend who is still using one of the proprietary mediocre operating systems).

For the occasional specialist software (engineering in my case) I do use a virtual copy of the appropriate OS in a Virtual Machine which has the advantage of instant rectification via snapshot should any malware enter.

One of the my favourite pieces of free software is “FastStone Image Viewer” which I use for editing photos, very user friendly and updated quite often.

There is room for both Freeware and “Payware”. Most commercial organisations would not dream of running anything other than Microsoft Office. The perceived risk would be too high. For home users however Libre Office is perfectly adequate unless you want to do fancy spread sheets full of macros.
On the security front Microsoft Security Essentials in tandem with Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware free provides a reasonable level of protection. For those who haven’t come across it, OpenDNS is a free service which seems to have put pay to most of the phishing emails I used to get. See http://www.opendns.com/support/dynamic_ip_windows/.
Lastly if you really want to go “Freeware”, then dump Windows for “Ubuntu”. However I have to say I do prefer Windows.

Long may the Freeware Windows developers continue. If you look at what is happening in the Tablet computer market, the choices are being diminished by the week. HP have just pulled out. It’s only with a band of developers not prepared to be dominated by big corporations will users continue to get good applications.

There is one piece of software which hasn’t been mentioned yet.

I recently looked into buying a new computer, but more than annoyed by the fact that all the big ‘discount’ suppliers would neither tell me how much of the price was covering the cost of Microsoft’s various Windows clones and/or other included Microsoft software I didn’t want, nor even offer to sell me a computer without such software included.

I feel that this way of selling is nothing more than restrictive trading practice. If I went into a large chain store to purchase a washing machine, I wouldn’t expect the vendor to supply me a machine only if I paid Severn-Trent in advance for all the water it would use! Would the vendor even legally be allowed to do that?

I suspect the majority of computer shoppers don’t even realize that there are free alternatives (which work just as well, if not better in many respects) to the horrendously expensive MS Windows. The retailers don’t want to let the public know, or even tell anyone how much they will be paying for Microsoft’s Windows above the basic cost of the computer. Even Which? magazine, supposedly the peoples champion wouldn’t help on this point (I’m puzzled by this).

Needless to say my current computer uses a widely available ‘free’ operating system, and free application software. Everything works fine, and I don’t need to be a computer geek.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering about the analogy I used above: like my software, my water is free.

In Europe, new PCs are (I believe) supplied without a browser and the user chooses which browser(s) to install. It would be good if new computers were widely available with a choice of operating system, which would highlight the cost of Windows.

I like Johnt’s comment about getting on fine with a ‘free’ operating system and application software, without being a geek. If more would do the same it might encourage others to do the same. Many people are computer enthusiasts but far more just want to use computers and avoid spending more than necessary.

I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux as my operation system for years now and hardly had any problem. It’s free (both as beer and speech) and comes with tonnes of free applications for all my needs: office software, photo editing, Internet browsing, emails, music etc. I am in no way a computer geek. However, for me it is about control. When I use Windows and other non-free programmes I am controlled by them as it is very difficult to change things to your liking, they impose an awful EULA on you and tell you how to use the things you have already paid for. With free software I am in control and decide for myself how to use it.

It is many years since I actually bought applications software since one can now do everything with professionally produced, easy to use, and fully featured freeware. I use a Mac, but almost everything has versions for PC and Linux. I’d like to mention :

Scribus. For DTP and page layout. Essentially equivalent to Quark Xpress, and much better than Microsoft Publisher. There’s a good book (which is not free)

Kompozer. Dream Weaver substitute for web page creation. Use with Filezilla for uploading

Inkscape. For drawing.

And of course I use Gimp, Picasa, GPSBabel, Open Office (including Impress). They’re all good, reliable, and easy to use.

Which Magazine – you have really annoyed me with your half baked article on free software alternatives in the latest issue (Sept 2011). How can you possibly have a 2 page spread on free alternatives without even addressing the single biggest cost to a PC, the Operating system. I dont even know how much Windoze costs nowadays but it must be hundred quid or so. Why have you not talked about Linux alternatives – Ubuntu, Linux Mint and other such free and easy to install alternatives. Dissapointing! Also, rather than just looking at one single product, how about a few alternatives (GIMP for photo-editing as an example).

Please Which? Do your bit for the Open Source movement and start educating your readers about real alternatives. (Maybe you have done this in your computing mag, in which case apologies, i dont get that ;-))

And what about a feature on the fact that you cant buy a Laptop/computer from the high street nowadays without paying for Windoze pre-installed..

I do not use any Microsoft or windows OS based software and I am able to do everything I want. I use the Debian Linux/GNU operating system. I use their testing distribution and so contribute a bit to their work. I have friends who I have helped install from Debian’s stable distribution and they just use their computers with less hassle that they would if they were using windows.

A particular advantage of using a source such as Debian is that you know that all your software is coming from a reliable source, and that no one is accessing your computer with updates etc. unless you fetch them. Also, there is very little danger of your computer being infected by any malware.

I was a bit disappointed in the article as well. Haven’t you heard of free audio, video and graphics packages – Audacity is very capable and has all the bells and whistles you probably want and GIMP for dealing with photos. Video is a bit more involved but Lightworks is pretty damned good. With LibreOffice what more do you need? Both Gimp and Lightworks take a bit ofg application but are very prowerful.

Common applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, photo editing, email are all fine and easily available under Linux. Nearly all PC users will need these at some point to the market and the scope for developers is huge.

The problems start with hardware.

Windows is the industry standard and any new hardware has Windows drivers – unless of course it is specific to Apple (more of this later).

If the hardware is popular enough to have a large global user base (wireless network cards, graphics cards etc.) then some time later Linux drivers will probably appear.

However niche hardware will usually only be supported under Windows (or Mac), and if you rely on this hardware then you will need a Windows OS (or Mac).

In my particular case I am a diabetic and need to test my blood with a meter.
My meter comes with a USB cable and some Windows software so I can track my readings on my computer and keep a diary to help manage my condition.
So I have a requirement for Windows.
I could of course enter all the results manually in a spreadsheet but why struggle?

I also use Microsoft Autoroute with a GPS sensor; at the moment I haven’t found the equivalent Linux application although I haven’t looked hard in the last few years.

I have a TomTom satnav.
The software to update it is Windows based.

So I am tied into Windows because suppliers of specialist hardware are tied into Windows because it is the market leader.
Manufacturers have to decide how much they are going to invest in software development to support their niche hardware, and on which OS.
Priorities are (1) Windows, (2) Mac, (3) Linux if you have serious geekness in your firm.
Market forces, unfortunately, rule.

The exception which proves the rule.
I am helping a photographer set up an old professional SCSI scanner which is still very functional but also very cheap because it is so old.
The software is only written for Macs.
The photographer has a Windows PC and the cost of a new Mac far outweighs any saving through buying this old scanner.
However Linux has a generic driver for scanners which can be mapped to support this one amongst many others. Score one for FOSS.
Then again a scanner is a very common piece of kit and so a generic driver makes sense.

So yes – I would use Linux and other free software if I could (well, I do because I have dual boot on my Windows systems) but I find myself working mainly under Windows because of the support for specialist hardware.

Oh, and to perhaps ease a little of the shine off the Linux glow: you still need to restart Linux if you update the kernel, which happens quite often; you will run out of space eventually unless (at least under Ubuntu) you remember to completely remove old kernels every now and then. Been there, done that…..although I am still appalled that I cannot run Windows XP SP3 on a 4Gb hard drive without eventually running out of space due to Windows Update.

Windows 2K where are you now?

Cheers

David

The moral of the story is about an elephant. The elephant in the room is ‘freedom’, this about liberty, with strong social implications. At first sight the issues may look like ones relating to how much is being paid, or not paid, in money. What drives the libre (free) software movement is liberty versus exploitation, freedom versus enslavement. Open knowledge and trust versus secrecy and a dis-abling of end users. Libre software can cost money. Proprietary software can be gifted free of cost. Frequently, the price of freedom is effort, perhaps inconvenience, and sometimes even a monetary price. I buy only Fair Trade tea. I do this for decided reasons. I do not buy it because I think it tastes best, but I do sleep better at night. Market forces, or should I say market power, can be a false friend, to be discovered too late when true friends have been stifled or destroyed.
‘Which’ is not a social nor a political commentary platform, but a narrow view leaves its subscribers in ignorance and almost certainly locked into vendors’ ‘market forces’ of secrecy in proprietary software. A broader view would lead to a choice of system, even if at present this is unusual for most PC users.
‘Choice’ – quite a good objective for a publication such as Which, eh?

I have been trapped for years by the lazy tendency to use the same old applications as I used at work – why bother trying to understand anything else? Then I recently used a loan machine while a failed hard drive in a new Acer netbook was being repaired and I was amazed how easily I got on with the pre-installed Open Office. I’ll never buy another Office licence. I’m also encouraged to look at some of the free options mentioned by other correspondents, especially GIMP. Just a point re the retailers – Novatech sell their PC’s with or without MS Windows and they are British to boot. I imagine there are probably others who do the same.