This is part 6 of a series on document creation. Which is part of a multi-series of posts on digital resources for mental health professionals.

Free and Open Source software (FOSS)

It may not be a priority for you if you work in mental health care to think about the licence of the software tool you are using. But I really think you should care! It is so important to make sure that you rely on tools that give you the freedom to use it for any purpose and change it as you like.

FOSS tends to use open standards and open formats, so you are unlikely to be locked in to a particular vendor to open your files. FOSS developers tend to take privacy and security seriously and won't try to trick you into agreeing to harmful terms. There is also a large community around FOSS, which means more collaboration and inclusiveness.

On the other hand, lots of FOSS projects are run by unpaid volunteers or grants which means you shouldn't expect all the features of proprietary software to be immediately available in its direct FOSS alternative. Sometimes FOSS can be frustrating and difficult to use, as projects may not have time to fund usability research or because they have a very different design philosophy to common commercial software.

By and large, there is much more transparency in FOSS and there are no degradation of quality over time due to rent-seeking behaviour because the motivation to build and develop FOSS is not profit. The community continues to resist attempts to sell personal data to advertises or for AI training, which is reassuring given that we have to keep patient data private.

Most FOSS programs work on Linux, Mac and Windows. So you don't need to switch to a different operating system to try the alternatives below. FOSS is also developing continuously, if you tried something few years ago, give it another try it may have improved a lot. They are all free to download and use.

Recommended Alternatives

• Microsoft Office → LibreOffice
• Google Chrome → Mozilla Firefox
• Outlook → Thunderbird
• Whatsapp → Signal
• Zoom → Jitsi
• SPSS → Jamovi
• MATLAB → R
• EndNote → Zotero
• DICOM Viewer (OsirisX) → Weasis
• Microsoft Windows or MacOS → The many varieties of GNU/Linux but my recommendation is to first try Linux Mint

Check out relevant links tagged open-source in my bookmarks for more FOSS suggestions

Conflict of Interest Statement: I have been an advocate of FOSS for over 20 years and have been active in the local Linux User Group (EGLUG). I still use FOSS exclusively on my computers and I have supported some projects with bug reports and small donations.

This post is part of a challenge to write 150 blog posts of ~~150 words~~ each this year. This is post 41 out of 150.