Where to find and how to take advantage of freeware and open source applications.
The adage ‘you get what you pay for’ doesn’t necessarily apply to the freeware and open source software available for download at no cost.
For many corporate IT managers, free tools provide much-needed technology in a pinch and augment existing investments in commercial products. While the nonexistent price tag initially draws people to freeware, it’s the versatility the downloadable tools provide that keeps users coming back, proponents say.
Kerry Miller, network engineer at First Victoria National Bank in Victoria, Texas, says his organization recently started using a program called Argus to monitor servers and routers in the bank’s network. Miller says the software application is similar to Ipswitch’s WhatsUpGold commercial software, but it’s free. He uses Argus in conjunction with Multi Router Traffic Grapher – a freeware staple for many IT managers – to monitor connections and bandwidth.
“Argus is something we stumbled across, and it turned out to be much better than the commercial products we looked at” for monitoring about 30 devices, Miller says. “It didn’t require as much customization for us to get it working.”
Miller also uses Snort intrusion-detection software and ACID , a tool for analyzing Snort event data. For Miller, ACID makes the data Snort collects more accessible to non-expert IT staff.
“If you have some networking experience, these tools definitely are easier to use, but adding the Web-based front end makes it simple to run reports on the Snort data collected,” Miller says.
In some cases, freeware solves an unusual problem for users who couldn’t find the same features in a commercial offering. “There is a lot of good technology out there that wouldn’t draw a big enough commercial market,” says Mark Douglas, vice president of engineering and operations at online dating company eHarmony.com in Pasadena, Calif. “So I can get technology that would otherwise not be available to me.”
Douglas recently started using FileZilla, an FTP client program that helps him move files between data centers without adding a line item to his budget. Douglas uses many open source technologies such as Tomcat, MySQL and Apache .
“The plus with open source and freeware is that it’s not just what you can write yourself to solve a problem, it’s what all your peers are creating and sharing to solve universal problems,” Douglas says.
Douglas uses search engines such as Google when he needs to find a specific tool. He also stays on top of what’s available through RSS feeds from download sites such as freshmeat.net and SourceForge.net .
A Web search helped Rick Beebe find TTCP , a free network-throughput tester from Netcordia, when he had to figure out why two adjacent machines were experiencing vastly different transfer rates. One was getting 50M bit/sec rates and the other only 3M bit/sec, says Beebe, manager of system and network engineering for ITS-Med at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn.
“In this case, I ran into a weird little problem that is kind of different from what I have in-house to track it down,” Beebe says. He used TTCP to test network throughput to the two machines and quickly resolved the problem.
“In a bigger use case, I may look for a commercial product, but I just searched online, found this and was able to fix the problem,” Beebe says.
The availability of low- or no-cost alternatives can help users squeeze some free extras from commercial software makers. At research firm Gartner’s June security event, 40% of companies with more than 500 desktops said they were getting their anti-virus vendors to throw in anti-spyware functionality for free. Gartner projects this will grow to 95% by year-end 2007.
Customers should demand that anti-spyware be provided at no additional cost when it comes time to renew desktop anti-virus contracts, the firm suggests. Threatening to go to another vendor that won’t charge for anti-spyware functionality can make a difference – and it may work for getting free personal-firewall functionality as well.
Meanwhile, vendors find that offering free lightweight versions of commercial software drives future business as users grow to need greater functionality.
Gent Hito, president and CEO of /n Software, says making a free version of applications available helps his customers decide whether the technology is right for them before spending money. The company doesn’t charge for its IP*Works! EDI AS2 Connector, a lightweight application for sending and receiving electronic-data-interchange documents over the Internet via AS2. Companies with an existing business-to-business infrastructure can use the adapter to communicate with a single trading partner for free; to communicate with more than one requires buying a license.
Software hasn’t officially announced the new tool but word of mouth is spreading fast, Hito says.
Bargain shopping A sampling of free stuff, and where to find it. | ||||||||||||
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