Introduction Part II: Freeware Ain't What It Used to Be

As mentioned in the previous post, freeware has long had an association with being nothing but a slew of evil programs filled with menacing coding that would unleash pop up ads at the worst times, give your computer some nasty spyware that allowed program villains to peek into your most valuable information, or just kill your machine outright. While no one should drop his or her guard when installing a new program, freeware isn't necessarily accompanied by the claps of thunder anymore. The Internet has yet to become a super safe playground, but getting a free program isn't an automatic acceptance of candy from a stranger. Many sites that allow you to download software (some of which host downloads for many different programs) offer a malware-free certification. You can take a look around CNET's Download.com for an example.

Many savvy computer geeks actually prefer some of the freeware offerings out there over the big paid ones, if expert opinions mean anything to you. Some of the more popular ones that you'll hear recommended many times over are OpenOffice, FireFox, and VLC Player. These are all, incidentally, open source software, too. To reiterate the point I made in the last post, a program is considered "open source" if its coding is freely available to all. Not all Freeware programs offer this, but there's plenty of "closed source" Freeware that are highly recommended, as well. Examples include DVD43 and ImgBurn.

For those wishing to jump on the bandwagon, or at least take a good survey of the landscape, SourceForge is a key download site for open source programs. It's a good place to start. One may also wish to roam around SoftPedia for Freeware downloads in general.

**A Quick Post-Script:

Important note about free downloads, though: free downloads are not always Freeware. They are sometimes Shareware, which are the equivalent of trial versions --usually limited in functionality--, for which a user must pay a fee in order to keep. Open source programs, as a general rule, will not present this confusion.