Software:

In our day to day life ,we often come across the word 'software' knowingly or unknowingly, maybe we know or don't know the meaning of it. Many of our older generation use this word related to computer course or degree which his or her son,daughter other relatives are pursuing.So they take for granted that software is just related to computers and is an educational field and most important a source to earn a great amount of money.

Now lets get over this and the question arises what actually is a software???.An expert will say that "its a collection of programs of various types that is used to operate on computers and its integrated devices to achieve specific results by taking in inputs and producing suitable outputs." In layman's language it can be defined as a set of instructions or commands designed by a person(programmer) given to computer to perform some work or they are the set of steps that are used to perform some activity that is needed by the user.

As we have got classification in almost all the products things etc,we too have classification in softwares.Softwares can broadly be classified into 4 main categories which are as follows::

• 1>>Application software: these are the softwares or programmes which are related to particular applications or they themselves are application.In other words they are directly related to the end users who will use them depending on their will.examples of these softwares are any browser say firefox,opera,safari etc

• 2>>System software: these are the softwares that are directly related to the operating systems and they in general supports the application softwares.Basically these softwares provide the necessary framework by which user communicate with the computer's memory and commands.example you can say is of any operating system.
• 3>>Web application softwares::Previously these types of softwares were considered same as application softwares.But with the rapid growth of internet technology there is need to consider these softwares as a different field.in this field all aplications are related to internet and connectivity or plainly you can say a networking field.examples are browsers,web servers etc
  • • 4>>Middleware services(softwares)::these are the softwares that in turn provides the job of servicing one entity to other.In general these are the mediators that serves as a medium for two different softwares to communicate. examples of this are CORBA etc or you can say sending email from one o.s to another o.s(the service which does this job is middleware services).
    • Now after categorising softwares,there is an alternate way by which you can term or label a software,i.e by saying *
    • Freeware::which means this softwares are free to use but they have restrictions on their copyrights,so you cannot sell them *
    • Shareware::Now softwares which have trial periods and after which you have to buy them generally come under this category. *
    • Open source:: Here the source code of the software is provided freely and you can modify the software to another and have the rights to sell this softwares.
    • * Liteware :: this are the softwares which are just like demo versions with some advanced features disabled. In this way, this was the brief introducation about softwares.
    • Following are some of the links for free softwares
    • www.softpedia.com
    • www.source-forge.net
    • www.download.com
    • www.brothersoft.com