This is a guest post by Jeremy Steele. He blogs at Nusuni.com and is an avid fan of open source software development.

Update (27 Sept. 2007): There is now a basic Italian translation (it doesn't cover all of the text in the article) available at Geekisimo. This was done without prior permission from us at Jatecblog or Jeremy, but I do thank the blogger for the translation.

Free software is the "in" thing right now, so, why not build and operate your website using it? It isn't very hard to do so, and chances are you are already 50% of the way there.

1 - The OS.
They say Windows and Linux servers are pretty much the same as far as security and stability goes (debatable), but Linux servers offer much much more. As an added bonus most hosts these days offer Linux solutions, so a lack of Linux hosts definitely won't be an issue.

2 - The Server.

Apache is the reason why I love using Linux as my server OS. Simply put - it rocks on 'nix and is horrible on Windows. In addition to Apache - PHP and MySQL are must-haves. Pretty much every host that offers Linux servers use all three of these things, so without doing too much hard work you can get a nice LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) setup.

3 - Get A Browser.
Firefox to the rescue. Oh, and don't forget about other browsers like Konquerer or Epiphany. The more browsers you can test your site in, the better off you are.

4 - Page Building.
There are literally hundreds of different open source text editors. Personally I like Kedit and Kwrite, but some people like VI and Nano (and insane people use Emacs, which is practically an Operating System in itself). The choice is up to you.

If you prefer to do things with a WYSIWYG environment, why not try out NVU. It is free and works really well.

5 - Graphics.
One word: GIMP.

6 - Content Management Systems
Just like with text editors there are hundreds of open source CMSs. WordPress, Drupal, PHP-Nuke, MovableType OS, just to name a few. Heck, if you are the adventurous type why not write your own and release it?

7 - FTP Client. Well, having all this code isn't going to do you any good if you haven't got a FTP client. Here's some of the better ones:

• Kasablanca
• gFTP
• Konqueror

8 - Extra Goodies.? There's also a lot of other open source goodies you can add to your site:

• phpBB - Forums
• Coppermine - Image Gallery
• TikiWiki and PHPWiki - Wikipedia-style software
• PHPList - Mailing list… etc

As you can see it isn't too difficult to primarily use free and open source software for your website's operation and development.