Is Free Software better than paid for Software?

Hi,

I just read this interesting piece of research from the internet:

I discovered that over half of large organizations used more than 10 different free software products, it makes me think that the free software I download must be just as good as paid-software.

What are your views on this?

Melissa

corporations use paid for software because the packages have features that they require, an obvious one is microsoft office, openoffice, star office, or any other office program that you care to mention has a slightly different formatting technique than office does, and the formatting cross softwares generally comes out looking rather horrible. but lets gloss over office as its a very common piece of software (industry standard if you will) say perhaps why use outlook or lotus notes over something like pop3 or imap email systems? well outlook has a level of collaboration and also has the exchange backend, same where lotus has domino/notes has a very good database backend allowing collaboration and business integration.

what are your sources? and what software did you specifically have in mind?

It will largely depend on the software you are comparing, but yes some free software will be just as good in certain situations.

We use lots of free software at my job including OpenOffice, Firefox, VLC, Eclipse, Handbrake, and WinSCP.

Would be nice if my work allowed us to use Firefox and other free apps but we mostly use Microsoft as we have a corporate license. Plus the cost of validation isnt really worth it for a small few in the organisation.

Firefox, Opera, CDBurnerXP, VLC, KMPlayer, Irfanview, Eclipse, NetBeans, Notepad++, FileZilla, 7-zip, Paint.NET.

These are all proven great freeware applications... many of them are used by various companies...

I forgot about CDBurnerXP and 7zip--we use those too.

It all depends on what do you need.

If you need to do some very specific task it is possible that there is no free software, or if you need software that wneeds to work with some wierd hardware, also there might be no free software.
If you need software for something simple (like playing music or simple video editing) sometimes free software is better because it is not bloated.

There is no general answer to this question, it all depends on what you want to do.

Sure, there are so many powerful free software available on the Internet, some are simple focusing on a single type of job other are feature-rich with almost all features you may wish.

I prefer free software because they do the same thing as the paid ones. If you want to create documents, presentations, spreadsheets you can use OpenOffice, create, view or convert documents (free virtual printers, PDF viewers, PDF and other free format converters), manage files, view photos (Picasa), etc.

In my views most free software hardly meet the required criteria....
But some of the freeware software are good enough in this regard...
but most them are Trial..

i agreed with you

I personally have not bought any software since shortly after joining this forum and OCing my first computer.
Useing Open Office, CCleaner, AVG and many others happily!
This is not because I am poor lol (this year spent 3k on hardware 0 on software.)
I am just not so rich as to spend my hard earned money for things that I do not need.
I can not even think of a program that does a better job than a free one that I need for my personal use.
As a matter of fact when I get a new computer I normally strip out most of the programs that people have bought.
I have never had a virus that could not be fixed free,
never had a blue screen of death ,
hardly any of the problems that most have with their bloatware and I run 24/7 hard.

I spent the time learning from some of the best computer experts for free too Right Here!

Not only the hardware side but the software and programing.
They not only do not charge but are excited to give away their years of knowledge

A lot of people use OpenOffice.org because it meets their needs and the price is right. I hope it survives the shakeup it had a few months ago.

After Oracle took over Sun there was a lot of tension between Oracle and OpenOffice.org.The board that controls OpenOffice.org thought that Oracle was meddling in the future direction of OpenOffice.org. Things eventually cooled down with Oracle saying that they were turning OpenOffice.org into a "purely community-based project". Still during the turmoil some of the OpenOffice.org developers left and formed a new group called The Document Foundation. They released a new rebranded version of OpenOffice.org called LibreOffice. It is based on a fork of the OpenOffice.org code.

The current version of LibreOffice is 3.3.2.

Note: the Ubuntu and Fedora Linux developers have announced that they will be switching from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice for their next respective releases.

in some case is free software is better than paid software, but in some case free software are not accessible and also not provide a full version in other case paid software is provide full version and it is also lenience based.


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jomwall

Paid antivirus straddles a middle ground between the basic freebies and the feature-packed security suites: They typically offer more comprehensive security tools (such as parental controls and identity theft protection) and more flexibility than a free antivirus package, but they have fewer additional features than suites, which are intended to be one-stop security shops.