In fact, if you're using the web at all, then it's very likely that you are using open source applications, since around 80% of the entire Internet infrastructure is based upon free open source software (FOSS).

Nervous about putting aside your expensive proprietary software and giving free open source software a try? That's exactly how the big vendors want you to feel. After all, it's your money they're taking, isn't it?

We're also aware that you may have heard a lot of arguments made against use of free open source software. So we'd obviously not expect you to blindly take the plunge without knowing a bit more about what free open source software is, and why most of those arguments against FOSS are based on misconceptions and false claims intended to keep you locked in to those same old greedy vendors.

We at Learning Works in Europe CIC take a different view. As a non-profit company, we just want to give you the opportunity to take control of your computing, with better software, better skills, greater productivity, and at lower cost.

We'll try to answer your questions about free software. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. So our hands-on one-day workshops are specifically designed to give you a taster of using free software.

You can then make up your own mind ... but we think we can anticipate what software you will decide to use thereafter.

Feature-rich software

Myth Free software doesn't give you all the features you'd get from proprietary software.
Fact Anything you can do with propriety software you can do just as well, just as quickly, and just as easily with equivalent free software. In fact, much of the innovation we now take for granted in closed source proprietary software (for example, tabbed browsing) originated in open source software.

It was open source software, for example, that underpinned Peter W. Higgs and François Englebert being awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics.

And did you know that much of the non-free software you spend out money on may actually be no more than glitzy user interfaces to what, beneath the bonnet, is open source software? you could have had the same thing for free.

Better quality software

Myth Free software is more 'buggy' than proprietary software.
Fact Any bug will be more quickly spotted and fixed than in propriety software. After all, there are likely to be many more contributors to free software than programmers of propriety software, not least because even non-programmers--users like yourself--can contribute bug reports. Even major companies like Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, and Oracle are routinely fixing bugs that have been discovered by end users such as yourself (so you end up working for the company for free). Open source projects just tend to be more open than proprietary systems about talking about their bugs.

In short, free software is generally just better quality software!

Better technical support

Myth If you use free software, you're on your own. There's no technical support as there is for proprietary software.
Fact Most free software has the support of huge communities of developers and experienced users; post a question to a forum and you're likely to get a helpful response from an expert within minutes. Better still, when you take one of our training courses you get free ongoing telephone and web-based support for three months.

And non-free proprietary software? go make yourself a cup of tea ... or two ... while waiting for an online response or, worse, being mind-numbed by wallpaper music while an irritatingly chirpy voice repeats to you every minute or so "Your call is important to us" and "Please hold while we try to connect you to the next available agent".

Privacy

Every time you use a proprietary operating system, every time you do a web search, every time you post to proprietary social media, every time you browse or buy from the big online stores, you compromise your privacy. It's a bit like leaving your back door unlocked for intruders to wander in and look around. Happy with that? Happy with those big companies sneaking away with your data to use for their own profit? You shouldn't be.
Free software doesn't do that. Because you control the program rather than the program controlling you. And of course the crowd-sourcing approach towards software development yields more secure code than any single company can accomplish in-house.

Freedom

In a society in which we take freedom of speech and freedom of association as inalienable rights, value freedom of the press, and expect freedom to privacy, it is remarkable that when it comes to technology most of us are nonetheless happy to sacrifice our freedoms to the dictates of non-free software. And we pay for it, not just in money but in loss of privacy and in loss of control of the programs we run on our computers.
When you use free software, on the other hand, you take back those freedoms, you protect your privacy, you have control over the programs you run.

'Free' as in beer & licence

Almost all free software is free of charge, gratis. Costs nothing, niente, rien, nada, nichevo, zilch.

But let's first of all clear up a potential misunderstanding. You'll sometimes come across applications that are badged as 'freeware'. They're often pretty good at doing what they say they do; but they're not necessarily 'free' in the 'free open source software' sense in so far as they may still be closed source. To know whether an application is truly free, look at the licence. If it says 'GPL' ('General Public License'), or 'LGPL', or 'MIT license', or 'BSD license', or 'EUPL' (and there are a few others as well) then it's really free.

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