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INFOWEB
How To Be a Free (Down)Loader
As companies put loads of free software on the Net, CIOs no longer have to pay for (almost all) their apps.

By Hasnain Zaheer

Tried out Version 0.0 of your software yet? Those 0s stand for free. Since software-makers are racing to offer their products free in the market space, the CIO can now pluck from the Net all the software that her company needs without paying a paisa. Operating systems for your desktops and servers? Free. Word-processors and spreadsheets? Free. Financial accounting packages? Relational database management systems? Web-servers? Free. Free. Free.

The benefits? Consider Sun Microsystems' decision to make its Star Suite-comprising software for spreadsheets, word-processing, presentations, graphics, databases, event-planning, e-mail, and news-reader-available free of cost on the Net. This one step alone could shave large chunks off your company's software bill: after all, a competing product, Microsoft Office, costs Rs 15,000 for every PC you load it on. BT presents the freeloader's algorithm for mining the Net for your favourite programs.

OPERATING SYSTEMS. Linux is the obvious choice since this free-to-use OS is considered by most experts to be as good-if not better-as rivals Unix and Windows. Agrees Sharad Talwar, 40, General Manager (Marketing), HCL Infosystems: ''It is robust, it has a stellar record of stability, it is user-friendly, it consumes minimal system resources, and, of course, it is free.''

While using Linux to run the server that powers your network is experimental no more, using the operating system on the desktop needs thought because your managers, used as they are to the Windows interface, will find Linux unfamiliar. To add a graphical skin to your Unix, you could try KDE, which not only proffers a GUI, but also incorporates a large suite of applications for Unix workstations.

APPLICATIONS. Maybe you swear by Linux. Or maybe you'd rather stick to Unix or Windows NT-and, now, Windows 2000-for your server and for your clients. Either way, you still don't have to pay for your apps if you don't want to. Sun's Star Office 5.1 is a full-service suite that can be downloaded as a 160-mb file from www.sun.com/products/staroffice. And it can run not only with files created on applications like Microsoft Office, Lotus Smart Suite, and Corel Wordperfect, but can also be used on any OS: Windows 9x, Windows NT, OS/2, and Linux. Of course, you could also pick from other free options, like Cliq Suite 1.3 (www.quadratron.com) which runs on all variants of Unix and Linux, or, for your spreadsheet work, the enterprise spreadsheet software, Xess 4.1.

ADVANCED APPLICATIONS. Is your data structured into databases that use the vastly popular Structured Query Language (SQL)? That's what CIOs who have to manage data, like customer transactions processing or employee records-usually do. The free option is the very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, robust SQL, MySQL, which costs nothing if used on Unix, Windows, or OS/2. An option, particularly good for students, is LEAP 1.2.5, a free RDBMS.

WEB SOFTWARE. Cash in on the fruits of the Apache Project, a collaborative software development effort aimed at creating a robust, commercial-grade, feature-rich, freely-available source-code implementation of Web Server software. The result is easy to use when setting up and running your Web-server.

As for Web-design, forget the point-and-click packages that newbies use to design their homepages. Industrial-strength software, enabling you to put just anything you want on your Webpages, can be, fittingly, picked off the Web free. HTML-Kit, for instance, is a full-feature drag-and-drop enabled editor, which has a real-time syntax editor, unlimited regular- and block-level undo and redo, and multiple methods of previewing-and is available free at www.chami.com. Or, you could try, inter alia, IMS Web Dwarf, which is an extremely versatile software (www.virtualmechanics. com)-or even SiteAid (www. siteaid. com).

Born to be free, weren't we?

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