The old adage, you get what you pay for, doesn’t have to apply. In fact, for a small business the high price tag of “threat management” software can often mean a company will just go without to its detriment. Here’s some high quality free and open source software to help, at a price any CFO will love.

Fermi is a high school that isn't afraid of experiments. This year, besides a project to build a mini-rocket to be launched in 2011 and setting up a photovoltaic lab, they're trying to solve with open licenses a problem that costs every italian students from 300 to 500 Euros each year, the cost of textbooks, and are inviting other schools to participate.

The governor of California has launched a new initiative to compile open source textbooks for the state. He hopes that the plan will help cut costs and improve the quality of education. The effort seems very promising, but the state's complex standards and arduous textbook evaluation process will pose major challenges.

The cash-strapped Golden State has decided that, starting next school year, schools will be able to use open source, digital textbooks for a number of math and science subjects.

New Ideas Corp. announced the immediate availability of their custom-built C3 workstations and laptops preloaded with Ubuntu on C3PC.com today. New Ideas Corp. began selling their custom built PCs regionally in 1997, as a way to provide high quality hardware to business at a lower cost than other builders and resellers.

Linux is known for a lot of great things, but you rarely see it listed as a platform of choice for multimedia production. Some of that poor reputation for multimedia has long been deserved, but in recent years the quality of Linux’s audio and video applications has been steadily increasing. One of the best loved of these is Hydrogen, a high quality drum machine application.

Even with all of the high quality software available, sometimes you just have to break down and write a custom application, and usually you don't have a lot of time to devote to it. This is the situation I found myself in when my wife started a new business and needed a simple means of tracking sales leads.

For University or Colleges looking to offer a high-quality learning experience to remote students, we've released a new version of BigBlueButton. BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system that offers real-time sharing of slides, voice, chat, video, and desktop sharing.

As a freelancer, you don’t have to fork over expensive commercial software: there are plenty high-quality open source applications and utilities that can help you to run your daily business smoothly.