Running a business using free software
Introduction
- What my business does
- Some of these tools are for personal use as well, e.g. calendar sync
Why?
- Control over core business tools
- Have seen proprietary business tools disappear suddenly
- Rapid development
- Ability to fix bugs directly in some cases
- Self hosting
- Data protection, security and backups
Limitations
- Only discussing software used in my business, not clients
- Can't control what others use
Requirements
Most businesses need:
- Core operating system - Xubuntu
- Invoicing and credit control
- Customer and supplier database (CRM)
- Website - WordPress
- Word processing - LibreOffice
- Spreadsheets - LibreOffice
- Calendar/diary - Nextcloud + DAVx
- Thunderbird - does most things, renders HTML emails without problems, Teams invites etc.
- (Neo)Mutt
- Evolution might be necessary if you have to work with Outlook calendars
- Dovecot for IMAP
- Postfix or Exim for SMTP
- SpamAssassin to manage junk mail - ideally reject at time of connection
- Used to run my own Postfix / Dovecot / SA setup
- Mythic Beasts now does most of the work for me - Sympl
Outstanding issues
- Still need Microsoft Office to open some documents - usually Word documents that have been perfectly laid out to fit on X pages, or spreadsheets with macros
- Scanner - Linux driver but not open source
- Label printer - Linux driver but not open source