The primary objective of any business that does not operate for a charitable cause is to generate profits. With the ongoing financial turmoil the world over, an increasing number of businesses are now looking at ways to reduce costs to combat the crunch. A large number of the businesses looking to cut costs are looking at reducing their IT related costs by opting for software programs available for free on the internet.

With the advent of open sources for software on the internet, not just businesses, but individuals as well are looking to fulfill their software program requirements through these sources. There are open sources on the internet that offer you software programs for almost every conceivable application in almost every sphere of the business world. It is common knowledge that most of the people looking for free software programs turn to SourceForge.net.

Getting and using free software programs or open source software from SourceForge.net is very simple. You can either go through their different categories or choose to search for what you want through the plethora of projects that are present on SourceForge.net. SourceForge.net is a repository which functions as a central point for people who develop software to manage and control the development of these software programs. By august, 2008, SourceForge.net had over 1.9 million users registered, and in excess of 180,000 projects.

Irrespective of the kind of business you run you can get some very good industry specific projects on SourceForge.net. Besides, there is a wide range of applications for everyday computing including word processors and spreadsheets. Owing to the rather steep prices of some really simple software programs, more and more businesses are turning to SourceForge.net.

There are currently over 20,000 projects in the business category of SourceForge.net; and this does not include projects involving multimedia, the internet, communications, etc. So no matter what you require for your business in terms of software programs, it would be a good idea to check the projects that are available on SourceForge.net. A couple of the projects that I have found useful include:

• Vuze: This is a bit torrent client which is free and is made use of for transferring files through BitTorrent. Formerly known as Azureus, it also lets its users to watch, share and publish original High Definition and DVD videos. Users publishing original content can also make some money from the process.
• AbiWord: This is a word processor that can compare with Microsoft's Word. You can use it to open word perfect office documents and can edit word, text, rtf, and html documents using AbiWord. AbiWord works across different platforms and last checked, AbiWord has been downloaded 2,535,962 times (one of those downloads being mine).

Projects for businesses include projects pertaining to e-commerce, accounting projects, time tracking projects, 'point of sale' projects, budgeting projects, printing projects, etc. With the wide range of projects that are available on SourceForge.net there is every chance that you can meet the requirements for your business' software programs through it, and that too for free.