[Glastonbury] letter to the Blcakmorevale magazine

[peter cole]

Please find the text below for a letter that i am going to send into the
balckmorevale magazine ( please feel free to edit, add and remove text )
and comments ( not to many flames please) 
regards 

peter 


>>> 
To the Editor,


I am sorry that this is probably going to be e boring letter for mos
people as it concerns computers. Not everyone's cup of tea. 


In 2001 the UK government paid approximately £100 million pounds for
software licences this is an annual on going cost. This is a lot of
money!! There is of course no legal way of avoiding this cost. 


Well there is, it is called Open source software. You stop using
proprietary software and use open source software.


What does this mean?


Open Source Software (OSS) is provided with a license that gives the end
user the right to use it freely for private or commercial use. You also
have the right to inspect and even modify the underlying source code.
You can give away or sell the original version you received or one with
your modification, provided that you then in turn pass on the modified
source code so that others can benefit from the changes you have made.
This last clause protects the developer's work from unfair exploitation
by others, while allowing the source code to be released to the
community. You are not required to pay royalties to previous developers,
but you are still permitted to charge money for the sale of OSS. This
disc may have been given to you by a friend; or sold to you for a small
fee, and both are permitted.


What software is available?


Office suits, Internet browsers ( these have better security than a very
well know Internet browser that comes with most computers), high quality
graphics packages ( sometimes use by hollywood) and 1000's of other
aplications


How can this help me?


You of course run fully legal licensed software on your computers! But
you don't want to cost of upgrading to the newest software package but
you can't open documents sent to you. You could try OpenOffice this has
good import and export filters. 


Open source software is available for many operating systems.

For more information on Open Source software that runs on Windows ® look
at this web site www.theopencd.org


"TheOpenCD" is a trademark of H.N. Omma


There are other operating systems that are open source Linux and BSD are
2 well known versions most of the software for the these operating
systems is open source. 


One very good thing about the Open source operating systems is that they
are secure and there are very few viruses that attack them up to 100
compared to 20,000 to 30,000 that attack another operating system. 


IBM, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Novell have all released software
under an Open source licence. 


Schools could also benefit greatly from this . See the 2 web site
addresses

www.linuxinschools.orgwww.opensourceschools.org/


Other useful links 

www.opensource.orgwww.fsfeurope.org


I hope that may look at doing an editorial on this as this could help a
great number of people and organisations save money. 

Do i use open source software Yes i have only run open source software
on my home pc for the last 2 ½ years and have not had one virus attack 

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