Free Software, Free online Services

Kevin Twohy, 20, a mathematics student at U.C.L.A., uses a free service on Facebook to store and share photos, a program called Picnik to edit the images, and Gmail.

For his English class last semester, he wrote a term paper about William Blake using Google’s free word processing software, even though Microsoft Office had come loaded on his personal computer.

The advantage of the Google program, he said, was that it allowed him to keep his information on Google’s servers so that it was accessible at any computer, whether he was working at his fraternity, a coffee shop, a campus computer bank or the library. The experience, he said, has persuaded him not to pay money for software.