Two examples of free and very useful software that I have come to use as much as any similar product are the FireFox browser and Google Spreadsheets. It’s interesting that the two come from different organizations and economic models and both arrive at the same place: they’re both free and very good.

FireFox comes from Mozilla.org, the open source project that spun out of Netscape when AOL acquired it. They’ve produced FireFox and Thunderbird, a very nice browser and email client that are fast, stable and easy to use and which are marketed by Mozilla Corporation, a company with paid employees formed to promote Mozilla.org products developed by a community of volunteer programmrs.

Google Spreadsheets is offered by the fantastically successful publicly traded company that is increasingly offering other free services besides its search engine. Still not sure how Google will monetize things like Google Spreadsheets: at the moment the company is very rich and can afford to do a lot of things – writing, debugging and hosting Spreadsheets is almost certainly costing millions. Google is using paid employees, and in turn is likely using open source code (e.g. the Linux operating system) as part of the product.

The common thread here is open source, and the dramatic changes wrought to the landscape of software development. Google and Mozilla Corp. (and Red Hat and MySQL AB) are all demonstrating that you can make money with ‘free’ software (and in the process dispense with things like software patents). It will be very interesting to see how this all develops… one wonders if countries like China will ever be major customers of software companies like Microsoft…

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