been writing about software for a long time now. Next week it will be precisely 35 years since I started doing so, as a writer on a highly popular computer games magazine in the UK. And when I’m not writing about software, I actually use it too. I do a lot of programming, and I spent almost 14 years in the IT department of a university.The longer you work around software, the more you begin to realise that the price of a product is often a very poor indicator of its quality. Some of the best, most innovative software is being written for smartphones and mobile devices, and typically sells for less than $5. Some of the most complex, unreliable, buggy systems I ever used, where installation often required 2 people and took 3 days, costs tens of thousands.There’s always been free software. Back in the 1980s it used to be called Public Domain. You downloaded it from online bulletin boards or you typed it in from the pages of a magazine. Some of it was great, but a lot of it was awful. Nowadays, public domain software is generally known as freeware or open source. There’s a huge amount of it around, encompassing everything from games