Welcome to Woollyblanket
We are advocates of the open source movement; software products written by the community and placed on the Internet for free.
This is a hobby site – we’re programmers ourselves and use many open source applications both for personal and business use, and can see what benefits they can bring especially to small organisations. Our aim is to provide a trustworthy source of advice for users to hear in plain words what a product can do for them and how it might meet a need. We also write articles about useful things we see around the web.
In addition you will find demonstration versions of the products set up (most are web-based) and ready for you to play about with. If a more in-depth examination of the product is needed then we offer free trials, a separate installation of the software which can be set up in minutes and used free of charge for seven days (and then deleted – this really is a trial and we don’t ask for any billing information!).
Where does the software come from?
Usually a programmer starts out by throwing together a little program to perform a task that he needs doing. Then he puts the program online, and another programmer who has the same or a similar problem can come along and use the first programmer’s program. If the second programmer adds any features then he will contribute the new version back to the Internet. Basically this practice avoids re-inventing the wheel.
If it’s free, it’s worthless, right?
Wrong. There are plenty of examples of open source products which are direct competitors to paid-for products. Since open source software isn’t produced for money, they have no marketing budget and so you might not have heard of them, but they’re all there.
I’m not a techie, how do I get some of this software?
A big problem with normal people adopting open source software is that it is written by programmers, and most programmers don’t know a lot about normal people. Here we aim to point you at the information resources that are available, and to provide easy setup so you can either use the working demonstration versions on our site or get any featured product running and use it in minutes, hosted on our servers, for free.
What now?
Click into the Products section and see if you see anything useful!