Software is one of the most expensive aspects of internet marketing, especially when you are starting out and having to design your own web sites, graphics, etc. Most free-ware just doesn’t compare to the expensive software, and if it does happen to be half as good it is a trial version that is going to cost something. Every dollar counts when you are getting started online. When you figure that you are going to need a good word processor, graphics program, Html editor, ftp program and whatever else I’m missing it all adds up to a chunk of change.You might say why don’t you just pirate a copy of what you need? Remember I am the ethical internet marketer! Plus with all the verification processes being developed now eventually you would probably get caught anyway. To me it’s not worth the chance of getting caught. There is an alternative that is free software and actually has some pretty comparable software to the big boys.

That alternative is Open Source, to find out what open source is exactly you can go to opensource.org. Basically it is free software that is covered under a variety of licenses. The most popular of the licenses is the GNU or general public license (GPL). You can go to gnu.org to read about this free software license. Basically you can distribute, use, and even make changes to the source code under the license. If you redistribute the free software you must include the source code and if you make changes to the code there are ways that you must document the changes.

So what is some of this open source free software? I’ve had the opportunity at some of my jobs to use Photo Shop and really like it. However the price tag was always out of my reach for home use and my internet endeavors . I found gimp and liked it, but it just seamed like it was taking me some time to learn the terminology of the menus. Then I found gimpshop which is gimp hacked to look more like Photo shops menus and terminology. It is an awesome program I use it for all my graphics now and the bonus is it’s free software.
You can get it at Plastic Bugs.

For word processing you have Open office and AbiWord. Both are good programs I started using AbiWord until my son told me about Open Office. Open Office is a suite of programs modeled after Microsoft office, as a matter of fact most Microsoft office files are compatible with Open Office. Now I use Open Office for my word processing, spreadsheets, database, presentations, everything you would use Microsoft office for. Don’t for get the bonus it’s FREE software.

Some other Open Source software is Filezilla for ftp, NVU is a html editor that is almost as robust as Dreamweaver, and this Blog is also Open source its Wordpress. The site I always go to to search for free software is sourceforge.net it has just about any kind of software you can think of. You have to separate the wheat from the chaff, but there is some really good free software there. One way to find the better programs is once you do your search click on downloads at the top of the results and it will re-index your results by most downloaded first. There is a very good chance that if it has been downloaded a lot it is worth looking into.

I’ll be posting more on each of the softwares I have listed above. I also have some tutorials I will be posting for some of them also. Check this free software out the ones I mentioned above are definitely worth the PRICE!

Filed under: