The Notion to Blog

I subscribe to the world of Open Source Software.  Its great, its author is the world and its continually improved upon many times a year for the benefit of the user.  I published a list of software that I user everyday and my world would not be the same without it.

Often I find I need a job done and I don’t have the software for it.  The first place I search is SourceForge.  This is undoubtedly the biggest portal for free Open Source Software.  Occasionally, what i need is not here so I search the wider internet using Google.  I put the word “FREE” in my search because I’m not a big one for paying for software unless its really necessary (for Windows XP for example).

As Google does, it offers a huge selection of FREE tools.

90% of these tools appear to be FREE because there’s  FREE in big letters all over their page. More often that not they’re NOT FREE.  They TRIAL’s!  In other words, they expire after 30 days or they have limited functionality.  I wanted a tool to transfer records from one database to another.  I found a promising one here .  The FREE version only transfers 20 records.  How useless is that?  Why not say TRIAL version?

If you compare FREE in the open source world to FREE in the commercial world ,its not the same.  FREE does not mean FREE if its a 30 day trial.