Computer software is a hot topic. The US Department of Justice has proceeded against Microsoft for alleged abuse of market power. The man in the street finds that he has to continually spend money buying and upgrading expensive software that frequently crashes. Rumours circulate about "back doors" in the software which report confidential information back to the vendor, or which allow the vendor to access any system running their software. Even experts get frustrated.

Yet people buy the software. Is it stable? Is it cheap? Is it secure? Does it come with a life time of free support and warranty? Is it flexible and can the user view (or even modify) the source code? The answer to all of these questions, is NO. So why do people buy it?

Lack of choice. Customers are locked into paying for the operating system and other software when they buy their computer. For the most part, they are not given the opportunity to do otherwise because of agreements between the PC manufactures and vendors. Are the commercial vendors exploiting their customers?

We can't answer that question, but we can propose an alternative. Reliable software. Free! And even with free support. Does this sound too good to be true? No, it's just a well-kept secret.

A surprising amount of free software is available and is being used not only by cost-conscious individuals, but also by big organizations. The majority of Internet Service Providers use free software, not commercial software, to run their operations. Telstra uses the FreeBSD operating system for key parts of its Internet infrastructure. The ACT Electoral Commission is basing its pilot electronic voting system on free software.

In other countries, both the French and German governments have initiatives supporting free software. The German lower house of parliament is considering upgrading its Microsoft-based computer systems to free software. The world's largest computer manufacturer, IBM, has pledged to spend a billion US dollars on free software development.

Why are these people interested in free software? It can't be the money, though it helps. The main reasons are different, though: free software is available in original "source" form, the code in which the programmers write the programs. This enables anybody with the requisite knowledge to solve any bugs which may occur. It enables them to write improvements to the software. It allows people to scrutinize the code and confirm that it contains no back doors or other security issues. As a consequence of this scrutiny, the software is also more reliable. This crucial aspect of free software has led to the term "open source". Users of free operating systems often don't reboot their machines for months on end, and it's very rare to hear of a software-provoked crash.

Who are the players in the free software movement? The original incentive came from the aptly named Free Software Foundation. Later the members of the UNIX development team at the University of California in Berkeley made their version of UNIX freely available under the name BSD. At the same time, a group of people around Linus Torvalds, at the time a student in Finland, created a UNIX-like operating system called Linux. In addition, a number of other projects have grown up over the last ten years, such as the Apache project, which maintains the world's most popular web server software and SAMBA, an Australian grown project that is now used all over the world for network file sharing with Microsoft computers.

Does this sound interesting? Come and see for yourself at the LinuxSA and AUUG Installfest on 25 August at the University of South Australia Magill Campus Cafeteria.

Bring your computer along and we'll install your choice of Linux or BSD on it. For details, check out the web site www.linuxsa.org.au/installfest