Free Software For Freedom!

Serdar Cevher While almost every average PC user continues to buy Microsoft Windows and some shareware as Microsoft Office or Photoshop which require serious payments for legal use, free software developers offer completely free, legal and strong alternatives to these commercial ones. As used by many Windows users too, Firefox web browser and OpenOffice are already well-known ones, while free software has also a lot of other programs to offer, especially big ones like Linux based operating systems. As one of the speakers at the meeting, Mustafa Akgul told the participants at his presentation entitled “Linux history in Turkey”, these systems, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Pardus and many others which are called Linux distributions, offer high quality environments similar to Windows programs that come completely free unlike the sofware marketed by profit-oriented corporations such as Microsoft and Apple. These free software provide regular users work with office documents, surf the web, send and receive e-mails, record audio, edit images and also with other facilities in daily computer use. In addition, these user-friendly and useful systems are not vulnerable to any kind of Windows viruses which cause serious damages like losing personal documents and hardware corruption; thus choosing Linux based operating systems for desktops or notebooks also provide safety. However, because the monopoly of Microsoft is established in the PC markets and PCs are sold with Windows installed by default, many people don’t have any idea about these Linux distributions which offer them safety and usability for free. So one of the major aims of Free Software and Open Source Days was to introduce these systems and their capabilities to all participants. Developers of Pardus Linux, which is coded in Turkey with financial support by Turkish government, distributed their operating system’s installation CDs for free to everyone interested. Development Process of Linux While […]













