BeltLine Bike Tour North Avenue Park Panorama 1

This panorama of the BeltLine Bike Tour ride start at North Avenue Park (original image 823 KB) was stitched together from otherwise ordinary digital snapshots using an entirely free photo stitching tool, Hugin. The Atlanta Bicycle Campaign is committed to using free Open Source Software wherever practical. Perhaps you should be, too.

The nerds who pedal among us - you know who you are - already know the lingo: open source, free software, Linux - the free operating system alternative to Microsoft's Windows and Apple's Mac OS X - and OpenOffice, a zero-cost productivity suite offering much the same functionality as Microsoft Office. I hear that word has even gotten out to the less digitally obsessed.

So what does this have to do with ABC and bicycle advocacy? Believe it or not the very website you are using has been made possible - at no software cost to us - through the efforts of an international team of volunteer developers who have put together a content management system called Drupal that is the core of the ABC Web 2.0 initiative. (The hosting company that we use to deliver these pages to you relies on 4 of the pillars of the free software movement - Linux, the Apache web server, the MySQL database server and the PHP scripting language - to provide its services for less than $10 a month.) In other words, we are paying zip and providing our users with a website that would have required thousands of dollars in outlays if created with the equivalent commercial software products. How's that for stretching your membership dues? (Not a member? Join now!)

And that's only the savings we have realized with the development of our website. The aging PCs at or office are dodging costly (and questionable) operating system upgrades and are now sporting Ubuntu, the ready-for-prime-time desktop version of Linux that is vying to become a replacement for Microsoft Windows, at a savings to us of around $100 a pop. By going with GIMP, a free alternative to Adobe Photoshop, and sticking with Mozilla Firefox, we are not only keeping our costs down, we are doing our best to keep our PCs, particularly those still using Windows, secure and virus-free.

Stay tuned for further updates about ABC's involvement with the Free and Open Source Software movement. We see this not only as a way to save money, but also as part of our broader commitment to sustainability, one that encompasses both the environment and the world of ideas.