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Graphic design­ers and dig­i­tal artists of all dis­ci­plines, per­haps more inti­mately than any other cat­e­gory of com­puter user, are famil­iar with the eas­ily sky­rock­et­ing costs of lead­ing appli­ca­tions. Stu­dent dis­counts, pirated copies, and fre­quent treks to the office or a pub­lic com­puter clus­ter can help keep the expense of artistry within man­age­able lev­els, yet this strug­gle with one’s own vir­tual paint box is detri­men­tal to design.

Open source appli­ca­tions are free to use, and have scores of asso­ci­ated guides, help com­mu­ni­ties, extras, and more, mak­ing them an obvi­ous answer for any­one tired of play­ing the high-priced game of pri­vate soft­ware. For graphic design­ers and artists, the use of tools that com­pli­ment your abil­i­ties and allow for true cus­tomiza­tion while cost­ing noth­ing are invalu­able, and these appli­ca­tions can become essen­tial com­po­nents of a cre­ative career.

One of the most widely used and expen­sive graphic pro­grams on the mar­ket today is Adobe’s Pho­to­shop, which is renowned for its com­plex­ity, con­fus­ing inter­face, and costly price tag. This prod­uct has actu­ally spawned an entirely sep­a­rate indus­try solely devoted to help­ing peo­ple try to under­stand the seem­ingly end­less eccen­tric­i­ties of the appli­ca­tion with books, man­u­als, videos, and even accred­ited courses. An artist with the time, patience, and pock­et­book power nec­es­sary to mas­ter Pho­to­shop is in fact bestowed with a tool capa­ble of refined cre­ative expres­sion and artis­tic out­put. But many users find them­selves daunted by the program’s eso­teric func­tion­ing and are unable to afford it any­way (and with fre­quent updates to pur­chase to stay on the cut­ting edge, buy­ing Pho­to­shop is no guar­an­tee of fully func­tional use). So what is a designer to do? As with most endeav­ors, cre­ativ­ity and col­lec­tive effort save the day — open source pro­grams are freely avail­able and allow for pre­cise, pow­er­ful design­ing no less func­tional than Pho­to­shop, but cer­tainly more accessible.

One of the lead­ing open source graphic pro­grams cur­rently avail­able is GIMP, or the Gnu Image Manip­u­la­tion Pro­gram. With a sim­ple foun­da­tion and loads of add-ons and extras avail­able around the web, GIMP is capa­ble of craft­ing qual­ity design work with­out wad­ing through exces­sive man­u­als or shelling out hun­dreds of dollars.

Of course, design­ers today can make use of many dif­fer­ent kinds of tools and appli­ca­tions, and as some com­pa­nies vie for vast prof­its with over­priced and pri­vate pro­grams, the open source com­mu­nity is devel­op­ing an arse­nal all its own. Some use­ful high­lights include Scribus, a pro­gram ded­i­cate to web page lay­out design and “pub­li­ca­tion ready” copy, QCAD, an appli­ca­tion for two-dimensional CAD ren­der­ing and manip­u­la­tion, and Mis­fit Model 3D, a model edi­tor with an excit­ing yet easy to use array of func­tions. These pro­grams are all free to use, are exten­sively sup­ported and updated with com­mu­nity effort, an encour­age open, rea­son­able, and respon­si­ble appli­ca­tion cod­ing; a fresh breath of air for those used to the con­fines of pri­vate soft­ware. With these ver­sa­tile tools, artists can embrace their cre­ativ­ity, increase pro­duc­tiv­ity, and pro­claim their inde­pen­dence from expen­sive and eccen­tric soft­ware programs.

Open Source Soft­ware (OSS) is a fam­ily of soft­ware which is avail­able to users under a pub­lic license which allows any­one explicit access to the pro­grams “source” code as well free­dom to run the soft­ware. This means that any­one, with the abil­ity, is given the right to edit the source code. This means adding func­tion­al­ity, or sim­ply cus­tomiz­ing the soft­ware to fit their spe­cific requirements.

There are a num­ber Open Source licenses, but they all have one thing in com­mon, they pro­tect the right of the user of the soft­ware to access and mod­ify it in any way they see fit. Prob­a­bly the most well know of these types of licenses is the GPL or Gen­eral Pub­lic License widely used free soft­ware license, orig­i­nally writ­ten by Richard Stall­man for the GNU project.

The legal right to mod­ify appli­ca­tions is in direct con­trast with and com­pe­ti­tion to closed source soft­ware mod­els, such as the pro­pri­etary licenses which cover most Microsoft prod­ucts. Only the cre­ator of a pro­pri­etary appli­ca­tion may mod­ify the source code. This pol­icy closes off many pos­si­bil­i­ties for com­mu­nity input, bug fixes, and slows the intro­duc­tion of new features.

This new, and as some see it, crit­i­cal abil­ity to change the way an Open Source Soft­ware appli­ca­tion con­tributes to a new busi­ness envi­ron­ment. No two orga­ni­za­tions are iden­ti­cal it’s there­fore unlikely that any sin­gle piece of soft­ware will sat­isfy the needs of all poten­tial users.

It should also be con­sid­ered, how­ever, that there are a great many core busi­ness prac­tices which may be repeated across orga­ni­za­tions, and indus­tries. These core prac­tices have been and still can be well served by the use of “stan­dard” soft­ware. How­ever more and more indi­vid­u­ates and their busi­nesses are choos­ing the func­tional, and finan­cial free­dom of open source.

Many of these alter­na­tive prac­tices are cor­ner­stone to the orga­ni­za­tions suc­cess, there­fore it is crit­i­cal that adop­tion of any new soft­ware solu­tions also pro­vide legacy sup­port these non-standard processes and for­mats. With­out seam­less data porta­bil­ity, mov­ing to a new sys­tem poses risk which typ­i­cally out way a desire to change. This require­ment to adapt a piece soft­ware to an orga­ni­za­tions spe­cific needs is one of many fea­tures that makes Open Source Soft­ware attrac­tive. Since the com­pany has access to the source, the appli­ca­tion can be freely adapted to suit the unique require­ments of each user.

Who Pays for Open Source Development?

The abil­ity to cus­tomize soft­ware is crit­i­cal to allow an orga­ni­za­tion to con­tinue to improve their busi­ness processes, but how does a com­pany afford to pay for such customizations?

One of the side effects of allow­ing any user access to the source code is that the cost of acquir­ing the soft­ware in the first instance is mas­sively reduced. In most cases the source code is avail­able for no cost. This enables the user to divert resources nor­mally allo­cated to pay soft­ware license fees into enhanc­ing the software.

A suc­cess­ful Open Source Soft­ware project has a large com­mu­nity of soft­ware devel­op­ers. Many of these devel­op­ers work as inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors and can be employed to cus­tomize the soft­ware, alter­na­tively, if a com­pany has inter­nal devel­oper resources, they can lever­age those skills to per­form the customizations.

Does it Really Work?

This all sounds fan­tas­tic, but does it really work? Are there Open Source Appli­ca­tions in use in the real world?

Here are a few facts to con­vince you that it most cer­tainly does work:

- Around 80% of web sites are served by the Open Source Apache HTTPD server.

- In a 2002 sur­vey it was found over 31% of UK and nearly 42% of Ger­man com­pa­nies were using or plan­ning to use OSS.

- In 2001, Debian (an Open Source Oper­at­ing Sys­tem), con­tained over 55 mil­lion lines of code and was esti­mated to have con­sumed over 14,000 per­son years in devel­op­ment time. That is a devel­op­ment cost of around 1.89 Bil­lion Dol­lars (US) yet it is still avail­able with no license fees.

We all surf the Inter­net daily, unfor­tu­nately many peo­ple don’t real­ize is that they are likely tak­ing their anonymity for granted.

Unwar­ranted wire­taps, stolen con­fi­den­tial doc­u­ments, and e-mail breaches seems like some­thing that only hap­pens in spy movies or to “other” people.

The truth is, you should be con­cerned just how much infor­ma­tion about your­self has the poten­tial to get trans­mit­ted across the Inter­net every time you go online.

Every Inter­net con­nected com­puter has a num­ber “ports” which allows a con­nec­tion. A “port” doesn’t denote a phys­i­cal hole or open­ing in your computer’s case, it means you have open­ings through which infor­ma­tion can pass.

Dif­fer­ent com­puter oper­at­ing sys­tems have vary­ing lev­els of risk for these types of attacks. Linux and Mac OS X are both con­sid­ered less prone to viruses and spy­ware, that is not to say they don’t have some of their own risks.

Depend­ing upon your con­nec­tion type (dial up, broad­band, and the like ), you may have sev­eral poten­tial open­ings through which you may be invit­ing to poten­tial exploita­tion by hack­ers, mali­cious code or viruses.

Com­put­ers with ded­i­cated broad­band con­nec­tions are typ­i­cally the most invit­ing to hack­ers. If some­one or mali­cious pro­gram gets by exploit­ing one of these unse­cured ports and into your com­puter, they can poten­tially log or even see in real time every­thing you do and the data you enter, includ­ing user­names, social secu­rity num­bers and credit card information.

The eas­i­est way to thwart attacks of this nature prob­lem involves using a fire­wall, antivirus and spy­ware scan­ner. There are a num­ber of these appli­ca­tions avail­able both online and in your local com­puter store.

Fire­walls also help you detect and block unau­tho­rized trans­mis­sion of infor­ma­tion from your com­puter to the Inter­net. This adds a sig­nif­i­cant mea­sure of pro­tec­tion if you get infected with a Tro­jan Horse virus that tries to “phone home” to the hacker with your sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion. The addi­tion of an antivirus and/or spy­ware scan­ner can help pro­vide the most com­pre­hen­sive protection.

If you’d like to test your con­nec­tion for vul­ner­a­bil­ity to attack, log on to http://security1.norton.com and run the var­i­ous diag­nos­tics. I would strongly advise any­one con­nected to the Inter­net through DSL or cable to get and use a fire­wall to pro­tect against unau­tho­rized access.

Infected with “Spyware?”

Pre­vi­ously we dis­cussed how hack­ers gain unau­tho­rized access to your com­puter. A new & grow­ing prob­lem online involves bundling embed­ded mali­cious code into soft­ware you will­ingly down­load or install on your com­puter or as mod­i­fi­ca­tion to the HTML on a web page.

Com­monly called “Spy­ware,” this refers to any pro­gram that trans­mits unau­tho­rized infor­ma­tion about you to a remote server or user with­out your knowl­edge of what is being sent. A com­mon pur­pose of Spy­ware involves the track­ing of a users online habits so adver­tis­ers can bet­ter tar­get ads to you.

Regard­less of how you it gets installed , you of course want to under­stand exactly what infor­ma­tion gets trans­mit­ted by the appli­ca­tion so you can decide whether to keep or unin­stall the soft­ware. Plain and sim­ple, these Spy­ware pro­grams will poten­tially reveal extremely sen­si­tive, or finan­cially dam­ag­ing infor­ma­tion about you and your online activities.

If you are con­cerned about Spy­ware and whether or not your com­puter cur­rently car­ries any, log on to www.lavasoft.de and check out the free soft­ware or you can just con­tact us.