Building an intranet from freeware offers a few advantages that commercial packages don't. First, there's the cost. Companies with very tight budgets can tap free components to build a system that might otherwise be too costly. In addition, by putting it all together, the builder becomes intimately familiar with the system's inner workings.
Nothing is truly free, of course.
Companies might need to spend valuable time setting up these free intranet components. To build an intranet, several infrastructure items must already be in place, such as an IP-based network and a spare system, which should be at least a 486 or early Pentium with 32MB of RAM and 700MB or more of hard disk space. Direct support is not available for most freeware applications, although almost any question can be answered in newsgroups or Web sites dedicated to the application. Our choice for an operating system was FreeBSD, a powerful version of Unix that can run on X86 systems. FreeBSD has extensive support for most networking protocols, including dial-up connections, and includes compatibility modules that allow it to easily run programs written for other X86 Unix varieties.