Traditionally, if you wanted some software (or an operating system for that matter) you were tied to a particular vendor. In the early days of computing, any applications (for instance a spreadsheet) would be sold under licence and the vendor would retain the source code of the application. This would mean you were totally dependent on the vendor to fix any bugs or to modify the program to meet your needs. As the vendor retained the original code (under licence you are forbidden to reverse engineer or copy the software) effectively you were locked in. Think IBM. Think Microsoft. Think Novell Netware.
Now, things are different. With FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD and other derivatives (such as Ubuntu, Fedora etc.) you are in control. As the software is released under a different licensing principle, not only can you freely make as many copies as you wish there is no legal restriction on you the customer modifying the program to meet your exact requirements. The GNU general public license and BSD license are much less restrictive than your typical "shrink wrapped" product licence.
That's not all, at a best guess, approximately 85% of the Internet (or World Wide Web) is powered by Open Source products or their direct derivatives. This proves without a doubt that Open Source is not only highly reliable, but scalable as well. In fact, many major corporations and government agencies are moving over to Open Source not only for servers and infrastructure projects, but also for desktop applications.
While we do not charge for software (except for application and web development), we do charge for configuration and consultancy. Taking into account the cost of licenced products (like Microsoft) on a small network we can make a reasonable profit and pass a substantial saving onto you.
At Anoigo, we like the stabiliy, security and scalability of FreeBSD. To read more about FreeBSD, please refer to the the FreeBSD 6.2 handbook.
Please, feel to call +44 (0)7770 695403 to discuss your requirements, drop Anoigo an email at sales@anoigo.co.uk or view our extensive Open Source Resource.
