Decrease your costs on software products, engineer!

A few years ago, I bought a very cheap laptop with a very week processor. I just needed something to be light enough to have with me in my meetings, travels, site visits, etc. The laptop was cheap, light, it had keyboard, screen, everything but functionality of a laptop! It was too slow to open a software, a text editor to write in, a web browser to visit a website!

I threw it away and bought a tablet, instead. Last day, I found that there are very functional distributions of Linux which can heal old and slow laptops and PCs. So I searched a bit and found Puppy Linux, one of the lightest Linux distros I can install on my older laptop. I did it and it worked! I can now easily browse internet, edit some text on it and produce some presentation files. It also has Python and I can have many more compilers on it. It is just magic!

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This showed me how easily a structural engineer may decrease their costs by using freeware and open-source software. They may decrease costs of operating system by shifting to Linux, they may not pay for licence of commercial software like PDF viewers, text editors, communication apps, etc.

So, these are my suggestions to decrease your costs as an engineer by paying less on software licences. And believe me, some of these open-source and free-wares work even better than commercial software! Just give these a try.

Operating Systems (OS)

Linux operating systems have many tastes and distributions. Some of them have more options and consequently are heavier. Some others are lighter and give less options to the user, although they work more smoothly on older and weaker laptops and PCs. Just search a little and find your desired Linux distribution. Most of the distributions have live experience of the OS, while you may choose to install and uninstall a few of them. But, at the end, you will find the distribution which works for you, and you love its interface and function.

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Document Editors

Google provides one of the best services for text editing, which sometimes work even better than any other commercial and famous software. You may edit your texts in Google Docs, produce spreadsheets in Google Sheets and build very nice presentations in Google Slides. All are free! The benefit of these services is that they are not only free, but also web-based. They do not require any installation on the computer. Just open the browser, open the website and edit your document, on any system.

TeX and LaTeX is another free option available. This needs more skills, but the result is outstanding. By shifting to TeX system, you have access to thousands of packages which are updated regularly; moreover, most of the publisher now like to receive text files in La/TeX format. So, it is a good skill to learn or try.

However, if you are still into WYSIWYG, then you can still try other amazing packages like OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

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PDF Viewers

Many of the PDF viewers are costly and commercially developed. But you have a good deal of freeware available. One of the most famous and lightest of them is Sumatra PDF. It can open almost any type of document and it is so fast! And if you prefer to do things in your browser, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome have very good built in PDF viewers. Moreover, you can install good extensions to handle your PDF files, to edit them and to share between your devices.

File Archiving

If you need to compress your files, you may use 7-Zip. It is free and covers almost any extension which compresses files. You may use it to compress and decompress your files.

File Storage

You may want to have a backup of some of your files. Furthermore, you may want to share some of them with your colleagues and friends. You may even run out of space on your older system, and need some extra space to store your files, photos, etc. So why to hesitate to buy a new storage for now? Why not just use some online services like Dropbox, Microsoft Drive, Sync, IceDrive, Mega, etc? On the whole, you may find over 10 gigabytes of online free storage space!

Code Storage

The same as file storage, you may use free services like GitHub, GitLab and many other free services just to store and backup your codes and even use their version control service.

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Engineering Software

There are many good engineering packages developed in open- and free- source format. Although it may be tough to migrate to these packages due to many reasons, but still you can give a try to free pieces of software instead of famous commercial packages. Some of these reasons are: clients may still prefer commercial packages, not all of them support the required extensions and formats, the outputs are tough to produce and to be handled, installation and educating workforce to use them is hard, etc.

FreeCAD, OpenSCAD and LibreCAD are three good examples of free CAD tools which give you lots of options like you can do parametric design using their programming API feature. OpenSEES is a good structural engineering tool which may replace many of the existing commercial software. And if you need more of finite elements packages, Calculix, Code Aster, FreeFEM++ and FEniCS are a few of many options available. You can also search online repositories for more of Python or Julia FEM packages. By the way, you may not find them as convenient to use as existing commercial packages, which are extremely easy to install and to use. You may need some knowledge and skills of programming to install them and build a model in them.

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Conclusion

As you can see, these are only a few of many options which provide you with the tools you need in your office. All are free of charge, constantly being updated, and you may never feel you need to go back to the commercial software. All you need is just to change your mind, to shift to and to use free-ware and to promote it. Most of this software are being developed by programming enthusiasts who do not receive so much on the work they do on this software. But we should not forget that the software needs some financial support to be kept updated, the servers they use may need to be paid. Their engineering teams may need to be paid, and not all the developers contribute all their free time on a free- or open- source project. So, do not forget to support developers of such products in any way you can. You may help them with your skills, you may promote them by investing in their projects, or you may help them by raising some funds for the works they need support in. Just help such software products grow.

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