PC World is running my latest article in its Business Center this week. In it, I survey a collection of open source applications for small businesses, with two distinctions: First, all of these applications are mature enough for anyone to download and try out, without any arcane tweaking or configuration. And second, all of them run on Windows.

Longtime readers will be aware that I’m a desktop Linux fan, and I try to use Linux for my day-to-day computing as much as possible. But the media tends to place so much emphasis on the Linux operating system that people sometimes forget that what really matter are the applications.

The truth is that you don’t have to give up your mainstream OS to use some of the best free software that’s available. If you’re friendly to open source, but aren’t yet ready to make the leap to Linux full-time, check out this piece and try out some of the great applications that the community has to offer.