[Cheiron]

We as users pay through our noses for ... new puters each 5th year, various hardware like printers, inkcartridges and ram, OS updates, our ISP, various software vendors and their updates and/or licenses, and various online fora we like to subscribe to (like chat/gaming/news-places or server rent).
This might help a bit on the wallet:

As an alternative to trawling through download.com etc. for software (and risk a lot of questionable things of various kinds) here is a pretty nifty site.

www.osalt.com


The site advocates open source alternatives to the known commercial software with helpful descriptions and download links. Here is their mission statement:

"Our mission is to provide easy access to high quality open source alternatives to well-known commercial products. And remember that open source software is also a freeware alternative."

Basically it works like this: say you want to find something like Photoshop CS, you can find that in "graphics applications" and under it there are links to various free alternatives that sorta can do the same. Or you check out Nero Burning CD (many people know that too) and again, you get a lot of open source alternatives that basically does the same.

I haven't checked the site thoroughly, but it seems very decent and honest.

Happy hunting
_________________
Cheiron
______________________________
"Any scientist with respect for himself should start
the day by rejecting his own pet hypotheses".
(Konrad Lorenz)

"Wir müssen wissen
Wir werden wissen"
(David Hilbert)

[Scotsman]

Re: Download.com

I know for a fact that download.com is very careful about what they list and they check all submissions very carefully before putting them on their servers. They have to be as they host everything on their own servers so have a higher liability.

Other sites not so much as they are just linking to whatever the developer tells them too.

One other thing, Open Source does not necessarily mean free of cost, or free of malware. These days you should be cautious about anything you download off the internet. Another reason to use a reputable download source that virus checks their listings.