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A new business requires an extensive outlay of startup capital. Bills mount long before the company ever opens its doors. A few of the required expenses are payroll, licenses and certificates, inventory, and marketing costs such as customer leads and advertising. After these required expenses are taken care of, the new company owner often finds himself struggling over what to spend the last bit of money on. Business software is costly, sometimes ranging into the hundreds of dollars. A new business owner may simply be unable to spend the money.
Yet there is always a tradeoff, as quality must not suffer. Documents that appear unprofessional send a message that the company is small, broke, and untrustworthy. It is critical for the new business owner, who does not yet have a solid list of references, to exude professionalism in every aspect of his business.
Enter freeware. The concept of freeware has its history in the early days of the personal computer. At that time, computers were hulking machines, much more impressive for their sheer size and mass than for what they could actually do. The self-taught engineers of Silicon Valley were much more interested in perfecting the hardware than in ensuring practical usability for the home market. This opened up a niche for self-taught engineers in other parts of the country who, having invested in the machines, were eager to see what they could make them do. So they wrote programs and released them to their friends and acquaintances. As they acquired modems and began logging into BBS's (the precursor to modern internet forums), they began to distribute their programming more widely. Shareware began to develop, in which a program was released for free with certain features disabled, and by sending a small amount of money (usually $5-$10) to the programmer, the user would receive a code to unlock those features.
Freeware and shareware went underground with the explosion of the modern PC. Software became big business, with thousands of titles released every year by large companies, with price tags ranging from $40 to several hundred dollars. Most of these programs work more or less on standardized protocols, allowing software from different manufacturers to communicate with each other and providing a reasonably seamless computing experience. However, as software companies became giants, quality began to suffer. New software began to be released before it was ready, and programs shipped with significant numbers of bugs. This phenomenon continues today.
An underground revolution has begun, with a new market created by those tired of spending ever more money on software of ever decreasing quality. Freeware designers have stepped up to meet the new demand and their work is admirable, often superior to the paid alternatives. Most freeware is now released as "open source," meaning that the code is available to anyone who cares to use it. This allows any user to infinitely customize his experience, and even to release his adaptations for public use.
Freeware programs that are useful for home-based businesses are numerous. Open Office (www.openoffice.org) packages a word processor, spreadsheet and database program with a multimedia presentation program and even a truly stunning graphics package. Mozilla's offerings (www.mozilla.com), notably the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird e-mail, are superior in innumerable ways, particularly in stability and safety. Gimp photo editing (gimp-win.sourceforge.net) and Free Accounting Software (www.freeaccountingsoftware.net/default.aspx) round out the list of what the average home-based business owner should need.
Freeware offers a reasonable alternative to costly software options. The programs are comparable, and freeware allows the user almost unlimited flexibility to customize his experience. For the new business owner, who is struggling to appropriately allocate limited resources, freeware is often the best choice.
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