Sep. 19--WHEN JOURNALIST Lauren Weber was a girl, her father refused to set the turn the thermostat above 50 degrees, rationed his family's toilet paper and tried to avoid pressing the brakes of the family car to save wear and tear on the pads.

In her new book, "In Cheap We Trust," she writes: "Cheap. Cheap suit. Cheap date. Cheap shot. It's a dirty word, rife with negative associations. We hear the word cheap and we think, miser, whore, Wal-Mart, made in China, something that's going to fall apart. It's an insult, almost any way you look at it."

Paul W. Frields knows better than most that's a fallacy.

He'll be helping to host Fredericksburg's Software Freedom Day from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. today at the Central Rappahannock Regional Library downtown at 1201 Caroline St. It's part of a global, grassroots effort to convince the public of the importance of software freedom and the availability of free and open source software, and will be one of 500 such events worldwide. The Fredericksburg Linux Users Group will be giving demonstrations and handing out free software.

Linux-based computer operating systems are one of the foremost examples of free and open source software collaboration. Underlying source code can be used, freely modified, and redistributed by anyone like "building blocks," Frields said. But non-techies who don't want to take things to that level may simply use it as a free, non-buggy replacement for Microsoft Windows.

Frields, of Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc., is a real player in the open-source world, and he lives and works in Fredericksburg. He's Red Hat's Fedora Project Leader. Fedora is a community-supported free and open-source Linux-based operating system.

The event essentially asks the question: "Why pay for proprietary software that often isn't as good as free software?"

Aside from multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns, the biggest hurdle the open-source movement faces may be the "cheap is a dirty word" syndrome Weber refers to in her book. If it's free, the rationale goes, it can't be good.

But proponents of the open-source movement say free software is usually far less buggy.

Frields practically spits as he talks about Microsoft's "endless cycle of broken promises," which he says is always followed by promises to get it right next time--at a higher price, of course.

As an example, he cites the popular, and free, Mozilla Firefox browser. "Every year it's faster and less buggy than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. People really like it. They've caught on to the fact that the features are there, that you can get it for free and that the whole ethos of sharing among people writing code makes it get better faster."

And it's not just tech geeks who live in Mom's basement using free software.

Federal government agencies using open-source software include the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice, Frields says.

"I shudder to think of how much we lose every year in our information economy to silly bugs that are so much less prevalent in open-source software," Frields said. And in today's economy, he said, it makes even less sense to pay for software you can get free.

Cheap really can be better.

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