People are surprised that we use almost exclusively open, free software (usually licensed as GPL – www.gnu.org). One reason is that we are not dependent on the software supplier for upgrades, and we can extend the software when needed. No one ‘owns’ the software, so we can plan for years ahead with confidence.
But it’s give and take. We freely distribute much of the programs we write inhouse. As other people use these, they debug them for us too, so it is a win–win situation.
Examples of free software we use are: TeX, XSLT, Python, Java, GNU/Linux, PHP, Apache, Perl, SVN, CVS, Postgres, MySQL, Mantis, GForge, Mailman, Emacs, Vim, and many more…
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