Me, a pirate!? Say it ain't so!

My conscience bugged me a little bit every time I opened up Photoshop 7, which I never paid for. Ditto for Macromedia Dreamweaver, Flash, Microsoft Excel, and Powerpoint. My computer was overflowing with pirated software and music.

Tonight, I cleaned house. My trash is filled with old CDRs. And I now own all of my music and software.

I will miss Photoshop. But my digital camera came with Photoshop Elements, a stripped down version of the full product. So I installed it. It seems to have most of the tools I used. And if it's missing something, I can use the excellent (and free) Gnu Image Manipulation Program, GIMP. Give it a try. You can download it from http://gimp.org.

I own Microsoft Word. But Excel, Powerpoint, Access, were not legally mine. So I've sent them to the bit bucket - replaced with OpenOffice, a very nice (and completely free) Office Suite. If you think MS Office is too expensive, check out OpenOffice at http://openoffice.org.

All those MP3s and movies? Gone. I've been buying my content via iTunes. There is also great (and free) music available on the Internet at places like http://garageband.com. And now iTunes has introduced me to podcasts, which are another excellent source of endless free content. And it's all legal.

My precious Macromedia products, however, are a different story. I'm all set with HomeSite, which I actually purchased a few years back. But HomeSite just doesn't cut it for me anymore. Dreamweaver was my friend and Flash was my buddy, as long as they didn't cost me anything. So tonight I'm pondering the purchase of the latest Macromedia Suite. But it's $1,000. And the open source community has yet to produce anything remotely like these products, so no freebies here.

Is it really worth $1000 for me? I don't think so, but I really like those applications.

It is amazing how much quality, free software is available out on the Internet these days. Thanks to the open source (free) software community, my decision to go piracy-free is much easier.

I'm legal. Yeah!