Open Source Services

Using Open Source software is not an "all or nothing" decision.  You are quite possibly already using Open Source software, under Windows or on a Mac, without realising it. 

Take Firefox as an example.  It is a web browser, a replacement for Internet Explorer, written by Netscape and available as Open Source.  It will run on Windows, Macs or Linux (and some others too).  It is more secure than Internet Explorer (it keeps you safer), and it is better in many other ways too.  Netscape browsers in particular, and Firefox in particular, follow the Web standards much more closely than IE - you may have noticed that different versions of IE render the same page differently and requires special HTML code to cope with the differences.

Most of the internet infrastructure is running Open Source software.  If it was not reliable and capable of running for long periods of time without reboots it would not be used.

The most popular web server on the Internet is Apache.  This has been around for many years, and is the standard by which all other web servers are measured.

Much Open Source software can be run on Windows or Macs, you do not have to be running Linux (or one of the BSD family) to use it.  It will generally play nicely with their closed source equivalents, so for instance you can have Firefox and Internet Explorer installed at the same time, and then simply choose which one you want to use for any particular task.  So you can try before you commit - you are not locked in, and if a particular program turns out to be unsuitable for you, you do not have to use it.

Most Open Source software follows on a tradition of doing its particular job well and simply, while leaving others to do what they do best.  So there are lots and lots of little utility programs around which do most of the things you will ever need to do.  There are exceptions to this rule, OpenOffice.org for example is an integrated Office system which does all the functions of Microsoft Office - but there are many alternatives you could choose: KOffice for example is a collection of programs which run under a desktop manager called KDE (which can run under Windows) and has many programs which are written to work together but are separate to do all the Office functions.

We can help you select the relevant Open Source software, show you how to use it - it is generally not very different to your existing software in the way that you use it - and then, when you feel ready and confident, we can help to move to an entirely Open Source environment.

Being Open Source has other advantages.  Do you have files that were written years ago but which you now can not read as the program that used them no longer works on your systems?  Very often there are Open Source conversion utilities that will convert the files into a more up to date format, or at least show them to you in a readable form.  Also as the programs are open source, they can be adapted to more recent systems should they stop working, and you can then continue to use them.

Being Open Source does not mean that you have to become a programmer, or that you have to change the code.  It just means that you, or anyone you ask to, can change the code.  If you want a new feature in a proprietary program, you first have to convince your supplier that this is a useful change, and then wait for them to decide when and how to implement it - which might not be in the way you anticipated.  With Open Source you can hire someone to come in and make the changes, and then submit them back to the community who will generally accept them (in some form) gratefully and maintain them in future releases.  You will find that the vast majority (99%) of what you need already exists, you just have to fill in any gaps that are sufficiently important to you to pay for someone to fix them.

DGA can help you along this road, we can show you what it possible, select suitable components, help you install and tailor them.