What is the difference betweeen "free software" and "open source" software?
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open source means you're free to do whatever you want with the code.  changing the software however you want.\n\nfree software you're just free to use, not to edit.
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http://www.freewarefiles.com
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The only advantage is if you find the software useful and trouble free. And that goes for shareware also. Note: there are a lot of freeware programs that are better than their shareware counterparts.
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http://www.nonags.com ... all free software\nhttp://www.downloads.com ... can search for free software ... change search preferences on "licenses" to free\nhttp://www.freebyte.com .. mostly graphic and music, but some utilities and other stuff as well\nhttp://www.filehippo.com\nhttp://www.jumbo.com\nhttp://www.gamehippo.com ... games\nhttp://www.majorgeeks.com/
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Yes, of course it is. One of the most important is the GNU project. Software release under the GNU public license are free to use, to modify and to distribute. It started after the appearence of Linux on the market! Many students and then firms created their own distribution package...\nA full list of software that is availbale under this license is available on the site below! :)
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Here's list of various Open Source Programs by type.
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Depends on the company.\n\nThe AVG and AntiVir free anti-virus software is given away free to individuals to advertise the business versions of those products.\n\nA lot of open source software (gcc, xemacs, etc.) is given away free and the programmers charge for a manual teling you all the cool tricks under the surface. Red Hat, SUSE and IBM all support Linux, so can invest in the software on the back of massive support contracts with people running Linux.\n\nSoftware such as Firefox is supported by selling merchandise and by getting a cut from Google for having the Google bar installed by default and Google as the default home page.\n\nOpera's free edition used to be supported by adverts in the browser, for which they were payed. Many small companies go down this route.\n\nThere are also some dodgy pieces of software which you can download for free that install rubbish onto your computer, that either dials premium rate numbers using your modem, or steals your information to sell to criminals. These tend to be either games or pornography based downlaods, but can be anything. So long as you know where you're downloading from, you can avoid these.
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Linux is a different type of Operating System. It is unix based system and you really need to learn about it before you use it or else you will not enjoy it.\n\nLinux is a free Unix-type operating system originally created by Linus Torvalds with the assistance of developers around the world. Developed under the GNU General Public License , the source code for Linux is freely available to everyone. Click on the link below to find out more about the operating system that is causing a revolution in the world of computers.\n\nhttp://www.linux.org/info/index.html
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Try one of the links below\n\nYou can search for free or freeware in them.\n\nI do have almost 50MB of free software just from these sites\n\nAnd There are alot more.
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Go to a command line and type in "free".  That should give you what you want.
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sourceforge.net hands down. It's all open source software.
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There are lots of different reasons for developers to offer their product for free.\n\n1. Some are in beta testing, and they need people to use the software and offer feedback.\n\n2. Tool bars and such can encourage you to use certain search engines or visit sites which they can make money off of.\n\n3. Some are just sample versions to entice you to buy the full version of the software.\n\n4. There are a number of open source developers, who believe that software should be offered for free so it can be built on as a community. You can read more about this category at the link below.
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The pros are you can do much more with linux than you can with windows, it's secure and most modern distros are as user friendly as windows, it's free including all the software you'll need (unless you want to pay a company for support), & the open source software is every bit as good as the closed source.\n\nThe cons are firstly you have to learn how to use it, mind you the same applies to windows, Windows games don't run on Linux although you can buy an emulator programme which will run some. The last problem with Linux is that hardware support is not as good, mind you this is the result of companies not bothering about their customers or potential customers. However most hardware will now run on Linux and if it runs it will run well.\n\nI have run Linux exclusively for 2 years now & don't touch windows at all.
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Hi ethanhant h,  Good question.\n\nMicrosoft's business principles are founded upon proprietary (copyright, closed-source) licenses.  I don't forsee the Windows OS going opensource because of the fact it's not in Microsoft's ethics, nor it's benefits.  Here are some reasons:\n\n- Microsoft is a corporation, and the open source business model isn't compatible with profitable operations\n- Security, Letting out your source code to anyone means it'd be easier for people to find faults to cause potential harm to your computer systems.\n- Not really Needed, Microsoft already provides development libraries (SDK's, .NET, etc) that integrate seemlessly into the operating system.\n- Less Experience, Less Programmers - if Microsoft were to go off and make their operating system open source, they wouldn't have the oppurtunity to use their financial resources to higher experienced programmers to create high-quality applications.  It's risky business just to let the source code of an application out and just expect people to work on it.\n- Copy-cats, it would give other people and corporations the oppurtunity to steal and copy code from the Windows Operating System (a peice of software that must have had hundreds of millions of dollars put into it).\n\nI can't think of a reason why people think Open Source Windows WOULD be a good idea, unless they really just want to get a well-seasoned operating system for free. (which is alot to ask, again, Microsoft has put hundreds of millions into windows development)
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You might look at running open source tools, since I doubt you'll get any of those for free.  See: http://www.opensourcetesting.org
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are the beta version of software free?\nIt depends on the software. Some betas are free, other are distributed to small number of person, others may need you to pay.\n\nIs is legal to use educational version for business purpose?\nDefinitely not.
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Linux is an open source software. What that means is that code that is written to make the final software is freely available for modification and reuse - given that you release your modifications to the public.\n\nWindows is a line of products released by Microsoft. Unlike Linux, MS does not release the code of there operating system (OS). Windows XP is the latest version of there OS.\n\nLinux in its bare-bone format is not easily usable. To be able to use it you need some software that run on it and some drivers to identify your hardware. Normally Linux comes with a lot of software that is developed by under the GNU project by volunteers for the Free Software Foundation. Under this form Linux is called GNU/Linux.\n\nSince Linux can be modified a lot of vendors have released their own version of Linux one of those vendors is RedHat. They release Fedora Linux for the public and RedHat Linux for corporate use. It differs from bare bone Linux in that it comes with an installer and several useful utilities and programs developed either under GNU or by Red hat or by other companies mostly under the same license - GPL.\n\nSo primarily the difference is that Linux can be modified but Windows can not. But there are several other finer differences. For most people Linux is about choice. Anyway you can read the details here http://www.michaelhorowitz.com/Linux.vs.Windows.html