There is a ton of software a new business sometimes feels that they must purchase right when they are starting off a new business.
There Word, Excel, and Powerpoint from Micro$soft that are usually very expensive.
There is also money management software, project planning software, and graphic software.
Well there is a solution for small businesses that are starting out is to use Open Source Software.
There is a great web site that lists all of the commercial software along with it’s Open Source Alternative.
Check out Open Source Alternatives web site.
They will show you stuff like
Expensive App Free Apps
Photoshop The GIMP
VISIO DIA
MS Office Open Office
Illustrator, CorelDraw Inkscape
Quickbooks Postbooks
There are many more and almost every big commercial application now has an Open Source alternative. It is possible that you may need to be running Linux for some of these, but Ubuntu has become as easy to use as Windows or a Mac.
I found another Blog posting about 50 top applications and their alternatives.
The post was made early in 2008 so the software most likely has gotten even better since then.
