My wife and I started a web development company back in June of this past year 2007. In doing so we sought out using open source applications to help us run our business from the beginning to help us save money. Using open source software rather than proprietary software would enable us to keep as low of an overhead as possible. In searching for alternatives to open source software (paid software) that could actually benefit our business and what we are doing, it was striking to find out how much money we could have been spending. I won’t waste my time and explain to you the paid software applications we were interested in purchasing. But rather, I will share with you what open source applications we have been able to use instead saving us an estimated about of $100,000 and counting. I say counting because unfortunately most paid software programs find a way to come out with new versions every year so that you can be charged yet again.

The List Looks Like This

For our website = Drupal Content Management System

For our Documentation = MediaWiki

For our Operating Systems = Fedora Linux Operating System

For our Weblog = Wordpress

For our Email Clients = Mozilla Thunderbird

For our Calendars = Mozilla Sunbird

For our Shopping Cart = Zen Cart

For our CRM = Sugar CRM

For our Accounting = GnuCash

For our Social Network = Elgg

For our Web Based Email = Squirrel Mail

For our Helpdesk = Cerberus

For our Document Mgmt. = KnowledgeTree

For our Timeclock = PHP Timeclock

For our office productivity = OpenOffice

The last thing we configured in was our web hosting costs. Because of open source software our Bluehost account is only costing us $6.95/month for 1,500 GB of hosting space and 15 TB of transfer. This alone, because we are a web business is saving us a ton of money!

Through costs of software, and also development costs to build some of these tools, we estimated that our company was able to save $100,000 because of these open source applications. Can you say Wow! I am in no way counting in what these applications have made for us thus far. That would be an entirely different number. This is just money saved. That’s it.

How is this possible? It’s possible because of all the good people out there who believe that open source should exist. What’s surprising to me is that many companies still continue to live in ignorance of these wonderful tools. I want to know how much money you have saved due to open source! Please leave your comment and share with us your numbers. Thanks

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