Running on Freebies

I found a new open-source product today.  Apparently it's been around for quite a while and I just haven't heard of it.  It was through an article in TechNewsWorld ("A Tale of Two Suites: Do We Still Need OpenOffice.org?" by Katherine Noyes, dated 17 May 2012) that I was introduced to LibreOffice.

I've used OpenOffice before, and I have found it quite useful.  According to the article, OpenOffice is a relic compared to LibreOffice; I'll have to download it and give it a try.  After all, the price is right.

I'm an Android user, as far as my mobile technology goes.  I enjoy the free apps that I get on my phone and tablet.  I have a Kindle app (which was free, of course), and I enjoy the free books that I'm able to download to read.  I use Paint.NET when I'm working with images; Audacity is my sound editor; I upload files to servers using FileZilla or WinSCP; I use SciTE for editing program files.  I backup and synchronize files through DropBox and Box.  I have created websites with Weebly, and Prezi is where I normally go to prepare a multimedia presentation.  And my security software is the free version of AVG.

As a matter of fact, as I browse the icons scattered across my computer's desktop, I'm not finding a single piece of software that I have paid for.  Yes, I'm quite the frugal user.  (In other words, I'm cheap.)

Yes, I still run the Windows operating system.  (I tried Ubuntu, but found that really utilizing that operating system requires a knowledge of Linux, which I don't have.  There were a couple of tools I tried to download and install that I couldn't get running correctly, because I wasn't sure how to fix them through the command-line interface.)  Apart from the operating system itself, I do everything I can think of on applications or software that didn't cost me a thing.

It's amazing, in ways, that so many things are freely available.  I know that almost all of these offer more features and greater functionality for paying customers; you still get what you pay for.  But, for an average user like myself, I haven't yet found anything that I'm needing to do that goes beyond the capabilities of the free versions which are available.  And now I have found LibreOffice, which the article suggests is much better than the OpenOffice I've been using.  (We'll see whether that holds true.)

I think it's wonderful, to be honest.  If people had to pay for software before they could try new things, think of the creativity that would be stifled.  I appreciate the fact that we can have so many tools at our fingertips, without having to limit ourselves to the applications we know that we will use enough to justify the expense.  This is a part of the computing experience that I truly hope we don't lose ... because I know that I have tried things (and actually succeeded at a few of them!) that I never would have attempted had I needed to buy a software package before it could be done.