7 - Response to Lecture

Week 7's lecture focused on 3 key words: community, collaboration and choice. It also discussed the differences between freeware and copyrighted software.

These days, there are so many programs that require you buy them such as Photoshop. Purchasing Photoshop can set you back thousands of dollars these days so most people just download it for free via the web. When purchasing a computer, also purchasing Microsoft Office is generally a necessity, especially for students and people who work in an office or business, as applications such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint are a part of many people's everyday lives.

The lecture also discussed writing code. Having done HTML and CSS assignments for Writing for the Web, I can say it can be a frustrating thing for a lot of people but I find it quite easy and fun to do. I've coded my own layouts for websites such as Livejournal and have also made my own websites since I was around 13 years of age but programs such as Dreamweaver are a life saver for people who find coding difficult, though it can cost over $100. There are dupes for programs such as Photoshop and the most popular one seems to be GIMP or Paint Shop Pro.

Source code is freely available to everyone and consists of certain applications such as VLC Media Player, Firefox and OpenOffice. These are usually developed by internet communities through collaboration methods. These communities come together to create programs and codes that will serve their needs, without having to pay large sums of money for a program or modifying software and having legal trouble.

As a consumer, we havechoice. We have many options when it comes to software and free source software so that we are able to run our computers the way we'd like to without paying extreme amount of money for numerous paid programs.

I use many free software applications, the most used one being VLC Media Player. VLC is a great alternative to programs such as Quicktime, Windows Media Player and other video/media players and even offers extra bonuses that those programs don't have, as well as the fact that it's free and available for both Windows and Apple computers.