RENDEZ-VOUS Should wildlife biologists use free software?

As wildlife scientists and professionals, most of us rely on computer software in our daily work. We invest a large proportion of our time in learning how to use different kinds of software effectively to do our jobs. Choosing which software to learn in the first place is therefore an important long-term decision. Many of us rely on commercial software such as Word, Excel, Out-look and SPSS or SAS when we analyse data, correspond with our colleagues by e-mail and write papers. In this paper, we will briefly discuss some important aspects of commercial software in general. More impor-tantly, we will introduce the reader to a specific alter-native to commercial software known as free software. Our impression is that the awareness of this phenom-enon is much smaller among biologists than in othe