With the current credit crunch crisis we are all looking for ways to save money. In the public sector, we always need to demonstrate value for money and our shoe-string budgets don’t allow for us to develop our PR tools in the same way a private company can. So ‘free’ is word we love, although it usually comes with a price …
Radio Four’s In business programme this week discussed the matter of free and interestingly the internet seems to be the only place where anyone can truly get a free product. The internet doesn’t offer the fake free we see in supermarkets with buy-one-get-one-free for example, it offers real products developed by companies such as IBM or through other web-users. The development of open-source software, allows users to build and develop on freely available software with the proviso they share their developments with other users. Open source makes its money through a small percentage of people/businesses willing to pay for a more sophisticated version of the product, as ‘bytes’ don’t really cost these charges cover the everyday user.
Within my team we are already utilising open source products as much as possible – these developments mean we don’t need to be behind the private sector anymore. If anyone is interested, Wikipedia has a good list of products available through open source.
And if you don’t get a chance to listen to programme, you can read a good synopsis here.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Tags: credit crunch, free, open source, software development, wikipedia
-
-
Authors
onewomanandherblog
Aside from the discussion around ‘why should the public sector have to find ways to do things for free when the campaigns we’re trying to publicise are arguably more important than those from many private sector organisations, and isn’t it time proper money was invested in our departments…’ Aside from that, I’ve used open source software at work and for personal web development and been more than happy with it. I find the level of support you can get online is great as people are willing to share their experiences, questions and solutions.