Is £500 a fair price for MS Office?
Should a new PC cost around £1000?
Should a Company be charged for using software on more than one machine?
The answers to these questions is very important to an SME. Ever increasing equipment and maintanance costs are a great concern and sometime hinder an organisation in maximising returns from their IT investments.
At the same time, these same concerns boggle the minds of the developers' community, where it is believed that the main software vendors are more concerned with making supernormal profits than they are with producing quality products.
This is where Open Access Software comes in. This is software that is available free from licence impositions, except for very few regulations to safeguard Copyrights. This type of software has always been considered to be unreliable and bug rich, and mainly has been used by Universities and hackers.
So, what's changed now? Well, Linux has made front page news in all the technical magazines. Microsoft allegedly considers Linux to be NT's direct competitor and is porting NT to it. Netscape has been available on Linux for some time. So has WordPerfect. Oracle is porting its database system to it. So are the other Database Systems. Linux is now officially a stable and effective system.
This is not all. Netscape has made its code available. Some Unix vendors are following suite. And apparently Microsoft is thinking of making snippets of NT code available. So, the Philosopy is changing. The conclusion one must arrive at is that Open Access Software is actually a good thing, for those who sell it as well as for those who buy it!
Now, this puts a different perspective on the purchase of software and IT solutions. It is now possible to compromise between investment availability and efficiency, with a bias towards efficiency.
This is 's
Philosophy. Keeping up to date with the latest developments, but
within a wider spectrum of possibilities, thus enhancing
opportunities. This because the small and medium sized Organisation
should have the same opportunities and tools available to the
bigger fish in the market.
In addition, at we believe
in and promote the free flow of information and the use of the
Internet as a major medium to achieve this. And it is our
intention to do what we can to aid in its achievement. We are
curently preparing resource pages full of information and links
which we hope will be of use to everyone, from the business
person, to the developer, to the hacker.
You will also find that even in our shopping mall, we will always offer a choice of suppliers for any particular product, so that you can make a choice after having evaluated them.
Please take the time to try Quick Advisor. This will help you assess your resources in light of your IS strategy.
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