The World of Free Software
Welcome to the World of Free Software. We at PC Pitstop have a very unique view on free software because we test so many PC’s every day! As I have already documented, I love free software. Not because of the price tag, but because in many instances, the free software is superior to its capitalistic competitors.
It’s a fine line for a software company, but most freeware entities spend almost all of their activity and money on development. Balance that against a more typical company that spends money on marketing, distribution, OEM partners, etc.
That’s the free software dilemma. At times, free software is a superior product with poor awareness and hence poor acceptance. I believe that everyone wants great free software, they just don’t know about it.
Hopefully, we at PC Pitstop can shed a little more light on the world of free software through this report. We will update the reports quarterly, and take whatever suggestions you might want to give.
At PC Pitstop, we have visibility on the number of PCs that have each software installed. Then we divide that number by the total universe of PCs installed to calculate the attach rate. The attach rate it the % of PC’s that have the software installed on their PC. That’s our basic methodology.
Here’s our first stab at the top 6 free software applications.
Paint.net (1.5% of PC’s) Graphics
I was really disappointed to see Paint.net at only 1.5% of PC’s. I use this program almost every day. There is a learning curve to do some basic functions such as cropping a photo but this is offset by the enormous functionality of the product. Paint.net, similar to many of its free software brethren, has a robust plug-in architecture, which enables a multitude of 3rd party developers to enhance the functionality of the product. I was blown away at the number of plug ins to manipulate photos and graphics. The strange thing is that American acceptance lags behind all other parts of the world. Hopefully, through this article, Paint.net will get more recognition for being one of the best graphics packages out there. More Paint.net analysis here.
Thunderbird (3.5% of PC’s) Email
Thunderbird is made by the Mozilla foundation, the same visionaries that brought us the Firefox browser. Unlike Firefox, Thunderbird usage is quite small and its attach rate is essentially a plateau. This is not good. A flat attach rate indicates that people are uninstalling the software at the same rate as people are installing. Personally, I love Thunderbird (although it certainly has its quirks), and it beats the pants out of Outlook Express or Outlook. But there is a huge hinderance to Thunderbird’s market acceptance, and that is the internet. Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail have been rapidly increasing the storage space that their online applications consume. Over time, these free in-the-cloud applications pose a serious threat to the adoption of Thunderbird. We’ll keep an eye on it here are PC Pitstop. More Thunderbird analysis here.
Google Chrome (6.5% of PC’s) Web browser.
Google came out last year with yet another entry in the web browser world. Our research shows that Google quickly acquired over 5% share but they are not accelerating. It seems as if there was an initial adoption rush due to Google’s name recognition, but it still remains to be seen whether the browser gets any traction against Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Open Office (14% of PC’s) Business Productivity.
Here’s the news flash. Open Office is rocking. In the last 12 months, Open Office’s attach rate has more than tripled from a little over 4% to over 14%. This is not a mathematical anomaly either. Our data set represents millions and millions of PC’s, so 2008 can truly be considered the year of Open Office. At 14%, this has to be enough to give Microsoft some pause. Probably even more concerning to the Redmond boys is that business is taking up Open Office as well as home users. More Open Office analysis here.
AVG Anti Virus (26% of PC’s) Anti Virus.
A little company out of Czechoslavakia has become one of the largest anti virus providers in the world. At 26% of all PC’s tested at PC Pitstop worldwide, they are clearly in the big leagues in PC security. The only concern is that their growth seems to have peaked in the middle of last year. It is also not a big surprise that there is a huge gap between home and business users, since companies tend to want to pay for their security. Either way, it seems as if AVG is here to stay. More AVG analysis here.
Mozilla Firefox (35% of PC’s) Web browser.
Hat’s off to the king of free software, Mozilla Firefox. First a digression. It recently came out that Firefox had just risen above 20% of web browsers. Our number is quite above the public number, why? In my views, there are two reasons. First, PC Pitstop measures whether the application is installed. Logically, more people have it installed than actually are using it. Secondly, the number looks at all of the web population including Apple and Linux users. Another reason is that Apple users are less likely to use Firefox than Windows users. The Pitstop measure is only of Windows users.
Either way, Firefox is a huge home run. They came out with a technically superior architecture, and word spread like wild fire. Microsoft is still scrambling to catch up on functionality. More Firefox analysis here.
Conclusion
Please make all your comments below. We will read them and consider them for the next issue of The World of Free Software. Thanks for reading.
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Terry Stockdale
It seem that all those Anti-Virus programs have at least one false positive within them for reasons we will never know anyway i just came across this browser.THE WORLD BROWSER, i have tried all the rest but i cross fingers i think this is the best.
Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are great, but I suggest an alternative, SeaMonkey, especially if you have a home office. It uses less ram than the combo Firefox and Thunderbird.
I say, though few know about SeaMonkey, and few use it, I recommend that you list it. I was bothered because SeaMonkey does not have Lightning addon as Thunderbird does, so, I installed Mozilla Sunbird the standalone calendar application.
I also use Firefox, Flock, and K-Meleon. I’ve always used multiple browsers, only now all Gecko.
Bruce and Dan,
I work for IT also. One of the main reasons we buy our software is for support. Even though some free Software may be superior to paid software we know when we have an support agreement we are able to get someone to help us when we have an issue. If we find the company is not providing the support paid for, we research for another software that provides better support service. When you are dealing with complicated systems which need to provide many types of services and software, you will run into many technical issues and you need an army of experts to help resolve them.
Contrary to what you said about the script kiddie damaging a windows system I can shut down viruses, trojans, ect through the windows taks manager. What that means is that I can remove a virus by hand which I believe that can’t be done on Linux. In fact if I know where a visus is at I prefer to remove it by hand instead of the antivirus. Javascript can be disabled in internet explorer as well. In a windows operating system I can also undo the damager by usig system restore which I don’t believe you can. Bruce IT experts have to deal with security ever day so be careful what you say to Dan because I can tell that you know nothing of Windows.
That’s true if you never download anything. When I download anything from the internet I always save the program file to my desktop and than scan the file with my antivirus. I switched to Avast by the way to see if AVG missed anything and sure enough AVG did. I’m never going back to AVG. Don’t take this personally Bruce, but I’d like to ask you a question. Were the computers damaged as if by accident? That’s totally relevant to your story by the way. It’s very easy to damage a system in process by a hack and only an experienced hacker knows how to avoid that. Unlike some people I value my customer’s data enough to do anything it takes to avoid hacks. I’m not scared by that way. I just feel exposing my network to the world isn’t worth risk of my customer’s credit card numbers being stolen. Companies are having sensitive information being stolen and I wonder why.
I think it’s funny how everybody brags about how good there anti virus software is( paid for or not) I for one, can understand why someone would think there software is great. I have not used anti virus or third party firewalls in six years, and have NEVER, EVER got a virus. Spy ware is handled nicely by Windows Defender. I run Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware(free)and it never finds anything either. No wonder they work so well… You don’t need ‘em…
free? NOTHING is free!
I suppose you program to error handling and handle buffer overflow properly? Buffer flow is a programming security issue by the way.
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The freebies I use are Zone Alarm (5.5.094)- works great and have never needed to upgrade, Avira, Spybot S&D, WinPatrol, Spyware Blaster, Webshots, Foxit reader (a million times quicker than Adobe for pdf files), ZipGenius 6, Fresh UI and Fresh Download, CCleaner, System Security Suite, O&O defrag 2000(windows defrag is useless) and many more. My AMD athlon 900 (don’t laugh) running XP SP2 hasn’t had a virus or bug for years. I tried Firefox 3, but in all honesty, IE6 works better and faster for me.
Bobbmp,
I am not sure what site you went to but Open Office is indeed free.
http://download.openoffice.org/
A good hacker is capable of many things and hacking most systems given enough time.
That said, it takes an experienced and very skilled “hacker” to exploit an open source system.
Any script kiddie can exploit a windows/proprietary system lol
That would be because an open source system is inherently more secure, patches 100 times faster and they are released before an exploit occurs.
Closed code leaves you at the mercy of the hundreds of thousands of exploits out there because holes are not patched by the proprietary systems, and worse because people can’t see the code patches can’t be produced by anyone other then the company that made the software leaving it wide open to anyone and anything.
I personally am not afraid to set up servers that have access to the real world outside of my local network. I am confident of the integrity and security of my systems.
SSH is currently running and accepts secure connections from outside my local network, and a secure https server running a mysql database.
Been running these services for years.
At last years hackfest, three machines were set up, only one was left standing when it was all over. These are some of the best hackers in the world. One system was left standing.
I also prefer to set up my small office network to be private instead of public.
From what I’ve read about hacking hackers can do pretty much anyting once they gain access to the system. Contrary to what you’ve said Bruce hackers have been known to hack through SQL Server. So if they can do that than it’s most likely possible to hack through a web server. The only question is how many hackers have that type of skill? I prefer two way firewalls to one way firewalls that’s why I’ll never download one of those free firewalls. I prefer full internet security instead of antivirus only.
I went to the Open Office website to check it out and discovered it’s NOT free! Whats up?
I wouldn’t be caught dead using a “proprietary thing like Visual Basic lol
The point is, I can see the code, the developers can see the code, people who contribute can see the code, and a simple dif on it will show what has changed and what hasn’t.
The code being available is what makes it more secure, not less secure.
If using a proprietary app, you don;t have access to that code, you can not very easily see it, and certainly can’t easily change it. If however there is a known security hole in it, it is far easier to exploit and spread the exploit quickly as people won’t know what has happened until it’s too late.
The internet mostly runs on open source software, Linux, BSD, and apache. If your concepts were true, then the internet wouldn’t exist as it would have been destroyed the first day it started lol
Those are probably the most accessible and visible computers anywhere yet they just churn along everyday seamlessly doing the thing they do.
I have Firefox 3.0.6 with the fabulous add on NOSCRIPT. I give monthly to the Mozilla foundation for internet research and feel they have the best browser out there. I use open office and feel it is far superior to the Student Office 2007 by Microsoft which I paid $156 for. I might be dreaming but maybe Microsoft can include Firefox in it’s Windows 7? I had an old Win98 and it had IE5.5 (Mozilla 4.0).It was a good browser. I will end my rambling comment to also thank PC pitstop for their Optimizer 2.0 and their others products which I use.
peh
If a hacker gains access to the system they could chanbege your program into a POW(potentially unwanted software) or malicious program such as a virus. Okay maybe the program was written in Visual Basic. The standard for game developement is to program the game window layout in visual C++ while porting in Maya for the graphics so just because the game was programmed in a higher level language doesn’t mean a thing since Visual C or Visual C++ can be ported in. Sure the interpreter of the programming language has to be programmed in the original programming language, but I believe it can be done. So exposed code can be used against you and the affects can be drastic. Exposed code can be turned against in some very bad ways.
If a hacker gains access to the system they could chanbege your a POW or malicious program such as a virus. Okay maybe the program was written in Visual Basic. The standard for game developement is to program game window layout in visual C++ while porting in Maya for the graphics so just because the game was programmed in a higher level language doesn’t mean a thing since Visual C or Visual C++ can be ported in. Sure the interpreter of the programming language has to be programmed in the original programming language, but I believe it can be done. So exposed code can be used against you and the affects can be drastic. Exposed code can be turned against in some very bad ways.
BM, Care to elaborate?
Care to show me some proof other then your complete misunderstanding of what “basic security is”.
Perhaps you can explain what you think “basic security” principles and practices are.
Or maybe Dan could explain when a security issue arises in Windows how he goes about patching the hole without access to the code? He doesn’t, he has to wait until Microsoft creates a patch, which is usually months away, sometimes years away and that is if they ever do it all.
As his counterparts using a secure system using Linux can see the code, can change the code, and can manually patch the code until the official patch is released, which by the way is usually a matter of hours once it becomes known.
You’ve just shown your ignorance Bruce and know nothing of security.
I agree with Dan. I’ll go step further and add that I only use AVG because the computer we have AVG on has a dialup connection and it’s only used for web surfing. If I had networked computers I’d go out and pay the money it would take for my internet security. Think about this for a minute. For paid software the software companies are recieving money. For shareware what’s the motivation for producing improvements? None that I can find. Internet Explorer has worked fine for me. The shareware is okay for basic use, but is plain trash for very use. You’re hearing from somebody who has experience.
Queen Bee,
Firefox has an IE emulator, just click on the Firefox symbol in the lower ride side of the screen and it will convert to IE and your Netflix should run fine.
Scott
Dan,
Being in IT don’t mean squat.
Your concepts of security are so far off based, in fact just wrong.
Switched from IE to Firefox and loved it but it’s not compatible with Netflix. To watch Netflix movies instantly I needed IE.
Switched from AVG to Avast on advice of someone. I hated it. The minute I was on it started scanning and couldn’t get it to stop and didn’t find a way to set a certain time of day to have it do an automatic scan. Went back to AVG.
I forgot to mention that I found PDF 995 does a great job at converting PDF’s. I didn’t really care for Cute PDF Writer. By the way. I use shareware if it does the job, but I’ve found most of it is junk.
I’ve had bad experiences with freeware in the past. One of them was word processor called flyword. It was freeware by the way. It lacked column formatting. I’ve formatted columns using the spacebar before and believe me. It’s a total mess! I normally stay away from freeware, but I really liked FireFox and AVG. I have Office 2007 Small Business Edition and don’t plan to download Open Office. Why! I don’t want to find out that it won’t do what I want it to do. I’ve had freeware clog up my harddrive before. I’ve been using Microsoft Office for years and it’s done the job for me.
To Bernie,
Yes, there is a paint.net. That’s the name of the software, not the web address. Their home page is getpaint.net, probably because paint.net was taken.
To Janet,
Windows XP has built in zip/unzip, so you don’t need winzip. Right-click on the zip file and select “Extract all…
I have found PC Pitstop to be a superb problem solver for me through numerous evolutions of PCs in my home and office. Their analyses and recommendations whenever I’ve confronted a problem has kept me from costly consultant fees and unneeded “fixes”. So, to all you “pros” commenting on how basic it is, I say, ‘keep to your pro stuff’. Let us basic folks continue to benefit from what Pitstop offers. Oh, did I mention that their basic services are free?
Meanwhile, thanks to most commentators for sharing your experience, evaluations and recommendations.