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Spending your time...
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Tue 7 September 2010,
18:19:45
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Open source softwaresYou regularly hear in the medias about the operating system Linux
as an alternative to the systems developped by a well known major
company. The Federal Tax Administration and the Brussels-Capital
Government are considering the option to use that technique in
their main frames. The Walloon Employment Minister, Maria Arena,
urge on to that kind of software solutions.
Linux is an open source software. It is best known, but surely
not the easiest one to employ for the basic computer consumer, as
it is mostly used by IT professionnals and other main frames
managers.
Some other systems, free and technically affordable, can
become one of your familliar softwares for your personnal use or
in your company.
Open source software ?
The 'open source' projects (also known as 'GNU projects') are
duty free programs, distributed with their source code. You can
get them for free, but they are submited to a licence (ex : do
not deliver to Saddam or Oussama). Concretly, an organisation is
settled to coordonate the efforts of independent developpers, and
to publish and spread stable versions of the softwares. As they
are developped by a large number of informaticians, generally
real and passionate experts, their quality is often better than
commercial softwares quality.
There are hundreds of these various softwares available on the
Internet. You can download them as easily as the commercial
softwares, except that, ... you do not pay!
Some open source projects
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The Linux
operating system is the best known amongst the open
source projetcs. |
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Mozilla and Konqueror
are open source browsers. Konqueror is only for Linux and
Apple systems. Mozilla was created by Netscape, and is
now the base for Netscape 6 and following versions (details). It is the
best browser available. |
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Apache is an open source web server.
It is even the leader of the market, more used than
commercial solutions. You are probably using it at the
moment.
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Another leader, the web language PHP, using
the client-server technology, is also a well known open
source project. You see it everyday on the Internet (and
probably one of these days on this website), when you see
the extension .php instead of .htm in your web adresses.
Some other extensions exist, from commercial web
languages (ASP, JSP, CFM). There are even some 'ready
to use' complexe PHP programs, developped as open source
projects. The PHP-BB (PHP-BB Fr)
forum and Net Portal Dynamic System and Portail PHP portal sytems are
examples of them. And even HRM projects with PHP, like PHPaie
(payroll in France) and Ganesha
(e-learning platform).
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PHP is generally utilised with the open source MySQL
data base system.
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DMoz (for 'Directory - Mozilla') is
also an open source project, but it is not a software. It
is a major directory created to be the challenger of a
commercial directory which is also in a strong commercial
position (let's call it "Youpii !"). DMoz
includes at the end of 2002 more than 4,000,000
references in English, 100,000 in French and 50.000 in
Dutch. It is the directory used by Lycos, Altavista,
Hotbot, Excite and Netscape. Also for the Google
directory.
DMoz Human Resources EN, DMoz Ressources Humaines FRAnd
guess who is the editor for the City de Liège section...
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Some companies also use the free way to face up to existant
monopolies. Like Netscape and Opera, the second and the third browsers in
the statistics, and StarOffice from Sun Microsystems, which offer
you for free a full set of office softwares (word processing,
tabler, ...) compatible with existant office softwares.
See also...
Bookmark this adress for a direct access to this page :
http://www.hr2hr.com/main.php?lng=en&page_id=221
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