Chapter 3 Examine an open source title (such as Open Office) and list advantages and disadvantages of using the open source program.

Open source software licenses are offered free of charge which means students can be given copies of the software to use at home regardless of their financial situation at home. It is often able to be installed on older computers, because the open source programs normally use less computer resources, such as RAM and disk space. Open Office is a good example. The current free version requires 256 Mbytes of memory and 650 Mbytes of disk space. The regularly priced $149 Microsoft Office Suite for Students requires 1 GB of memory and 1.5 GB of disk space for all of the applications to work. Microsoft claims Open Office is "The flexible word processor, powerful spreadsheet, dynamic graphics, database access and more meet all requirements for an office software package." It runs on most major operating system platforms and upgrades are released several times a year, so it is easy to take advantage of new features quickly. It is quick and easy to install (reviewers claim 5 minutes.) As for disadvantages of using, I know of at least a few instances where documents created in the purchased Office were not able to be opened in the Open Office. It appeared the Open Office was not able to pull enough system resources. This would not be a problem in an environment where both students and instructors were using the same free Office. Another problem might be if tech support were required. Microsoft is not required to support the free software, whereas they have a warrantee period for the purchased products.