With the open source community driving competition for traditional commerce driven companies (such as Microsoft), many small businesses are turning to lower cost (or free) alternatives to common software packages.  For example, the Mozilla foundation is taking a large market share of web browser usage away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer - but did you know they also offer great email and calendar software alternatives as well? 

OpenOffice is a great alternative to Microsoft Office, and includes a great array of software that can replace Word, Excel, Draw and Powerpoint and even has a few added features such as a rich text editor similar to WordPad.  Businesses that are using this alternative save upwards of $300 per computer in licensing fees. 

Will enough market be taken away from commercial companies?  And if so, will licensing fees be lowered to compete in the decision process, or rise to offset lost revenues due to the opensource community? Questions that will be answered in time.

With these great efforts from the collective minds in open source, watch for potential replacements for other popular software.  Can anyone say Adobe Photoshop?