The Complete Guide to Open Source and Free Software

The world of Open Source and free software has seen some exciting times

lately. Some of this excitement stems from the growing variety of software

that's available. Today, Open Source and free software is not just restricted to

Internet gateways, web servers, and security and management tools anymore.

Rather, there's something available for everyone, be it desktop users, mission

critical servers in a data center, embedded systems, or even for specialized

applications like High Performance Clustering, unified communication, document

and content management, and even for those with disabilities. So much so that

many research agencies have predicted that commercial software license costs

will fall because of this growing interest in Open Source and free software

amongst enterprises!

Now that's a lot of excitement to look forward to. At the same time, it also

raises a lot of questions. The most obvious one is the confusion over the very

definition of Open Source and free software and the differences between the two.

Then the remaining stream of questions starts pouring in, about the plethora of

licenses, reliability, availability of software, selection process, support and

implementation issues, killer technologies and trends, etc.

That's why, apart from creating and bundling a free Linux distribution (like

we do every year), this time, we've extended the story to answer most of these

queries on the subject. So not only will you get a really useful Linux

distribution, PCQ Linux 2008 with this issue, but also get all your other

queries answered on Open Source and free software.