The tired maxim "you get what you pay for" isn't always true. Yes, some people are understandably concerned about committing their businesses to inexpensive tools, assuming that good software is necessarily pricey.

But I can make the case that open-source products, many of them free, are changing business and personal computer use. Relying on programmers around the planet -- who donate their expertise to making the programs better -- software such as Firefox, OpenOffice and others have become competitive.

Business has figured this out on the server end, where Linux applications power many networks.

On the home front, I rarely need to launch Microsoft Office, having used the free OpenOffice for several years. OpenOffice reads Microsoft formats and can save documents in them. It offers a word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation program and, though lacking an e-mail tool such as Outlook, it packs plenty of punch. That is probably why IBM is using it as the basis of a major new move.

IBM Lotus Symphony should ring plenty of bells to those who recall Big Blue's 1995 $3.5 billion purchase of Lotus Development. Once an industry titan, Lotus introduced Symphony in 1983, pricing it at a whopping $600. That product failed, as did IBM's bid to unseat Microsoft Office with the OS/2 operating system and SmartSuite productivity programs of the 1990s.

IBM is trying again with its version of the OpenOffice suite, a product whose roots go back to a German company, Star Division, which Sun Microsystems bought in 1999.

Sun turned StarOffice, as it was then named, into an open-source project, clearing the way for development efforts to proceed unfettered by the agendas of individual corporations. IBM has announced that it will assign 35 full-time programmers to the open-source group behind OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org), meaning that the programmers will contribute code to improve the product. The move is reminiscent of the boost IBM gave Linux in 2000, when it began to back the operating system with marketing and engineering support.

How about that question of perceived value? You can buy Microsoft Office 2007's standard edition for a little more than $300, depending on where you shop; the home edition can be had for less than half that. Microsoft Office is often part of the purchase price of new computers, helping the company push its customer base to 500 million users worldwide.

With Office 7.0 recently released, though, the question of paying for the upgrade comes into play for many users, who must decide whether the cost pays for necessary features or options they rarely use.

I haven't run into problems with Open-Office, though I'm sure there are areas where Microsoft offers more options. I don't need those options, and in terms of what I do every day, the free alternative works just fine. I have open-source e-mail and contact management alternatives, so I don't miss Outlook. IBM hopes that business users will opt for its Notes collaboration software for communications tools.

But the real issue isn't market share. At this juncture, I doubt anyone expects Symphony to put a serious crimp in Microsoft's hegemony on the desktop. It might, however, turn more heads in terms of document formats, because, like OpenOffice, the new offering uses the OpenDocument Format. The latter is designed to allow documents to be read by many software programs rather than being tied to a single vendor's product. And the Symphony move comes just when Microsoft's document coding scheme failed to get approval from the International Organization for Standardization.

Boosting acceptance of the OpenDocument standard is a major thrust for IBM, which backs a set of specifications that are freely available for inspection and use. Such standards free companies from a predefined and costly upgrade path. IBM could have simply made its new Symphony products available to existing users of Notes (Version 8 shipped this year). Instead, it has chosen to make spreadsheet, word processor and presentation manager available to a broad audience, a boost for open-source methods that should stimulate their use.

But the renewed round of office suite wars begins amidst another revolution, the one Google and smaller companies are spearheading through their online office products. Look at Zoho (www.zoho.com), which seeks to migrate major productivity tools to the Web. Critics cavil at existing Web products as being too slow and feature-poor. The bigger picture is that as these objections are overcome through new technologies (think Microsoft's Silverlight, for example), the trump card of online software will be ever more apparent: collaboration. Will Microsoft and IBM follow Google and Zoho into this arena? If so, when?