The Midwinter season of gift-giving may be past for another year, but there are some gifts that keep on giving throughout the year thanks to the generosity of groups and individuals around the world. Nowhere is this more apparent than in open source software, that is software that is created to be used by anyone, anywhere, entirely free of charge. Beyond its obvious benefits for individual users, open source software proves once and for all that capitalism is not necessary for the smooth functioning of society. Open source programs can often hold their own against, and even exceed in usability and functionality, paid software that retails for hundreds of dollars.
Among the best known, most useful and most widely used examples of open source software is LibreOffice. On the Microsoft website, Microsoft Office Home 2024 is currently selling for £119. LibreOffice is completely free and does pretty much everything MS Office does just as well if not better. I’ve used open source office suites since I was introduced to computers in the early 1990s. I found LibreOffice about 20 years ago and have used it ever since, mostly its word processing and desktop publishing app, Writer. With Writer, I’ve produced everything from single-sheet advertising flyers to 480-page books and the entirety of the British Druid Order’s three distance learning courses, which now run to over 4,000 pages, profusely illustrated throughout. I’m not hugely tech-savvy but Writer’s design and intuitive user interface make it ideal for beginners and old hands alike. I’ve tried MS Office for the same tasks and find it incredibly clunky and requiring a steep learning curve before anything worthwhile can be produced. I’ll stick with LibreOffice for as long as it exists. It facilitates my work like nothing else I’ve ever found.
LibreOffice has the added advantage of being cross-platform, working equally well on MS or Linux operating systems and even that weird thing Apple produce. Its other included apps are Impress (presentations), Calc (spreadsheets), Draw (vector graphics and flowcharts), Base (databases), and Math (formula editing). I’ve used Impress for illustrated talks and it’s every bit as good as MS PowerPoint and I find it easier to create presentations in Impress.
Another widespread and incredibly useful example of open source programming is the Linux operating system. Most PCs and laptops bought these days come pre-installed with whatever iteration of Microsoft’s Windows OS is around at the time of manufacture, but you don’t have to stick with it. The last laptop I bought had MS Windows 11 installed. Windows 11 is full of bloatware and riddled with spyware that reports your every onscreen move to Microsoft, much of it designed so that it can’t be removed without rendering the OS inoperable. So I erased it and installed the Linux Ubuntu MATE OS in its place. The Linux OS is fully configurable, contains absolutely no bloatware or spyware, boots more quickly than Windows and runs more efficiently, as evidenced by the fact that it gives my laptop at least 50% more battery run time.
There are any number of flavours of Linux OS available so you can pick one that best suits you. My current favourite, Ubuntu MATE, looks good to start with and is easy to configure to look even better. It also runs well on older hardware, which is great for those of us on a tight budget.
The third of the triumvirate of freebies I’m recommending to you today is PDF24. If, like me, writing and desktop publishing are your things, you’ll know that PDF files are often at the core of both. LibreOffice allows you to easily save documents as PDF files, but only in a limited range of PDF formats. This is where PDF24 comes in. You can take an existing file and resave it in any one of a wide range of PDF formats. You can specify the dpi (dots per inch) of text and graphics within the saved file. You can compress PDFs for posting online or emailing. You can merge several PDF files into one. You can edit PDFs. In fact, you can do pretty much anything you need to do to a single PDF file or a group of them. It’s a brilliant piece of software and, again, it’s open source and totally free. You can download and install it on Windows. There's no Linux version at present, but all its tools can be accessed free online. Contrast this with Adobe Acrobat, which you can no longer even buy as a stand-alone program but now have to rent from the publisher at a cost just shy of £20 a month or nearly £240 a year for the Pro version, the only version that offers as much versatility as PDF24 offers for no cost at all. I discovered PDF24 last year and now wouldn’t be without it.
Of course, a lot of work goes into producing these brilliant pieces of software to give away, so the producers won’t say no if you want to give them a donation to keep them in coffee and doughnuts, but they don’t pester you to do so and won’t disable your software if you don’t. Oh, and they don’t include adverts for other products in their software either. They are kind, generous, lovely people and I am blown away by their generosity and genius.
So, join the open source revolution today and help smash the market place!