Dave Richards from Largo, Florida has posted an excellent article on supporting your local governmental IT staff when they choose open source. Mr. Richards points out the obvious cost savings in choosing free software but makes some other excellent points.

I've written before about some of the advantages of open source software, but I have just stumbled onto an article illustrating on key advantage of open source software, longevity.

GNU Linux, and open source software as a whole, have great advantages to the community of people that use it when compared to closed source, proprietary software. Two of these advantages are the ability to communicate directly with the developers to request features and report bugs, and the ability of the project to live on because the development is not dependent on a company.

BOINC is an open source program based at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. BOINC is a software platform for Linux for volunteer computing and desktop Grid computing.

A must have tool for web developers is Quanta Plus, a multi-purpose development tool. It supports code highlighting for many languages and applications, FTP, projects, plugins and much more. To be honest, I have barely scratched the surface of it's capability. Half the time, it is easier to open a document in Kate and edit it. Kate is the notepad of Linux, but on steroids.

Kopete is a multi-network, multi-account instant messenger client for use with Linux systems. I run Kubuntu Fiesty Fawn and use this exclusively. I have two msn accounts, a yahoo account and an AIM account. Kopete supports 11 IM clients out of the box.

GnuCash Financial Management is a free, open source alternative to highly priced commercial accounting software.

GnuCash provides the tools necessary for personal and business financial management. GnuCash includes everything found in commercial software costing hundreds of dollars including the double entry accounting method, customizable reports, invoices and customer management, job management, budgeting and much more.

I have used Captcha to implement an anti-spam contact form for Joomla. I was tired of the spam I received through my contact form. Here is the zip file containing the files and installation instructions. I am planning on implementing captcha for the comments in WordPress as well. I used a PHP Captcha Security Implementation found here.