The concept of using free software (The real cost of software)

For a long time, I have been talking with people who say that software market is dead and there is no market for development out there. There are a lot of free software out there. Yes there are plenty of free softwares out there but it costs time and effort to learn to use them and troubleshoot them. Recently i was using a mail server called Axigen. It was previously maintained by another staff. Then it failed one day. I went through a lot of trouble to get it back up as i am windows user. Using the vps posed to be some problems. Trying to install Using linux was another. I had problems like trying to install gui and it didn’t work. Dependencies and conflicts. I even went to disable the firewall so that i could port fowarding so it was able to access the mail server from outside. Then the mail program itself was another problem because different version had different structure and the program didn’t have a import in backup file. I spent like a few days to even get to transfer files out of the machine. Then after transferring the files out of the machine and restoring the files back i found the service still didn’t run. There wasn’t much help but i remembered something about the license seems to expire. So i went to get a new free license to install onto the mail server and started running the service again. This time it worked. Then i went back to the failed server and installed the license too and it was able to run then. This took me a few weeks to get to learn the system and know that it is foolish to run a small scale mail server then to let a mail service provider do the work.

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