A few years ago our Church did a Yard Giveaway. Instead of having families take items to charity donation boxes, we wanted to try to recycle items in our own community. We had everyone clean out their closet so we could give stuff away to people who might need it — no one came. After discussing thing we realized no one would believe we had anything worth stopping for if it was free. The next year we tried the same thing, only this time we called it a Church Yard Sale. Several folks came, but when they asked how much an item cost we told them it was free, everyone wanted to know what the catch was. We couldn’t get anyone to believe there was anything worthwhile if it didn’t cost anything.

Since I’ve been giving reasons for churches consider using Open Source, I wanted to conclude with a list of open source programs for most common tasks. If you wonder if something thats free could be as good as something that costs (sometimes lots) of money, try out some of these programs.  You can find other programs that don’t cost anything, like iTunes or Acrobat Reader, but this is a list of free, open source projects.

• OpenOffice.org: a full office suite with word processor, presentation, spread sheets etc…
• Sumatra: I hate how slow Acrobat Reader is when I just want to look at a page of a PDF, sumatra is a faster PDF reader.
• Firefox: a Web Browser with lots of addons available.
• Thunderbird: an email and news reader.
• VLC: media player, can handle nearly any format of audio and video.
• NoteCase: notebook.
• The Sword: Bible Study software, has many translation including the ESV.

Enjoy!