Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) | Gadgeteer There are pro’s and con’s for both proprietary and open source software. It is a question of the right tool for the job. Open source is not necessarily free! I see great opportunities for levelling the playing fields in the South African IT industry, and believe that open source will enable small IT companies in South Africa to provide win-win solutions. Below are some of the key links I track regarding open source software. Note I have also included some Freeware software (free to use but source code not distributed so it is free to use but not free to modify). See my Open Letter to South African BEE / SME Vendors Do I Really Need Microsoft Office at Home? Open Source is Secure and Mature Wordprocessing / Documents Management / Reading Open Office – open-source office software suite for word-processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases (recently given to the Apache Software Foundation by Oracle). IBM Lotus Symphony – also a free office suite. Cuneiform - an OCR system.
HTTPD - Apache2 Web Server Apache is the most commonly used Web Server on Linux systems. Web Servers are used to serve Web Pages requested by client computers. Clients typically request and view Web Pages using Web Browser applications such as Firefox, Opera, or Mozilla. Users enter a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to point to a Web server by means of its Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) and a path to the required resource. The most common protocol used to transfer Web pages is the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Apache Web Servers are often used in combination with the MySQL database engine, the HyperText Preprocessor (PHP) scripting language, and other popular scripting languages such as Python and Perl. The Apache2 web server is available in Ubuntu Linux. At a terminal prompt enter the following command: sudo apt-get install apache2 Apache2 is configured by placing directives in plain text configuration files. apache2.conf: the main Apache2 configuration file. Apache2 is a modular server.
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