Commercial filters are often expensive, especially when used on a large number of computers, as would be the case in a school computer lab or in small or medium companies with computer networks. In contrast, open source filters are generally freely available for download.

Testing is an important function of the software development process, no matter how big or small the development project. But not every company or developer has access to professional testing tools, which can run into hundreds and even thousands of dollars. The good news is that they don't need them, thanks to the tons of freely available open source software testing tools.

Osalt is aimed at helping end users to find open source alternatives to well-known proprietary products like Photoshop, Dreamweaver or enterprise products like Bea Weblogic or HP OpenView

To be sure, the alternatives don’t have Apple's muscle with the media industry. This translates into a lack of a movie/TV download service to be seriously competitive with the likes of what iTunes can provide. Despite this drawback, there are still some great open source alternatives to iTunes for those who are more interested in software freedom than software convenience.

Ahead of the first-ever Open Source Software (OSS) BarCamp event, which will take place on 28 March in Dublin, chief-organiser Laura Czajkowski has said that small-to-medium businesses have much to gain from open source, even if it is just to realise that there are alternatives out there.

More and more organizations are relying on open source software to build, test, deploy, and run mission critical IT applications. From small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, organizations worldwide are continuing to find open source as a cost effective means to deliver quality business applications.

While it's pretty painless to convert from commercial office software to an open source version, if you'd like to replace commercial security products with open source counterparts, you'll likely have to do some work. You may need to combine several open source tools to get the functionality you get from a single commercial product.

Setting the legal nuances of the chosen open source license aside, wouldn't two products under any open source license have the same claim to the open source moniker?

Large organization don't contribute that much to the open source projects they use. Why and how can we help create a positive environment inside large organizations that will help them contribute to Open Source projects : bug, patches, translation, documentation for existing project. Is it a dream to have large organizations create and open-source some of the technology they develop internally ?