Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on May 29, 2005 04:44 PM
> Office 97 is more than capable. I would suggest that its not clear at all that an upgrade was needed.
Sure, that works fine for a single user at home.
But you must have missed the part of the article where it said that, in addition to the 110 older PCs running Windows NT and Office 97, they also had 158 newer PCs running Microsoft Windows XP.
Those newer PCs were probably running a newer version of MS Office. And that's a problem, because Microsoft intentionally leaves out full backward compatability. Thus, once you have one PC with a newer version of Office, it causes a lot of inconvenience, until you are eventually forced to upgrade all of your PCs to the newer version of Office.
But this school chose not to succumb to Microsoft's extortionary tactics, and instead migrated to Linux and OpenOffice. Good for them!
> And why give up the deliciously slick usability of MS software for the clunky, slow, awkward OpenOffice offering?
Well, that just proves that you've never used OpenOffice. I have, and it is just as slick as MS Office.
But even if I had never used OpenOffice, I would still be less inclined to listen to you, and more inclined to listen to the City of Munich, the Government of Brazil, and companies like IBM and Novell, all of whom did an evaluation, and chose to switch to Linux and OpenOffice on the desktop.
> Until the recent betas OpenOffice didn't even have support for word-counts of text selections! Outrageous!
Yes, I know.
And how about that Microsoft Office? It won't even write PDF files! Shocking!
> Even in a communist society you don't get something for nothing (ultimately)...
That's right. And that means that I am never going to get what I want if I let dishonest, lazy monopolies like Microsoft run the IT industry.
On the contrary, in order to get what I want, I have to put out some effort. And that's why I do what I can to support Linux. I am also glad that companies like IBM, Red Hat, Novell, Sun, and Oracle find it profitable to support Linux.
> There's plenty of crap commercial software, but there's an awful lot more more crap free software;
True. And there is also some _excellent_ commercial software (like, say, Visio, or Windows NT 3.51, before Microsoft ruined them), just as there is some excellent Open Source software.
> Commercial software, however, eventually disappears if its crap.
Commercial software can also disappear when it's good, because the company that owns it goes out of business, or stops producing it.
Worse yet, Commercial software that starts out good can degrade, as in the examples of Visio, or NT 3.51, mentioned earlier.
Open Source software, on the other hand, only tends to disappear if no one is using it.
And Open Source software rarely degrades. If the current developers screw up the software, or allow it to stagnate, then someone will fork it, and improve it. The migration from XFree86 to X.org is a good example of this.
> The only reason that free software exists is because of [glory or addictiveness]...
So, you're saying that IBM, Red Hat, Sun, Novell, and Oracle are only contributing to Open Source development for the glory, or to satisfy some programmers' whims. Wow. Have their stockholders heard of this?
But of course, you're wrong. Those companies are into Open Source for the profit it earns them.
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Re:Why bother
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on May 29, 2005 04:44 PMSure, that works fine for a single user at home.
But you must have missed the part of the article where it said that, in addition to the 110 older PCs running Windows NT and Office 97, they also had 158 newer PCs running Microsoft Windows XP.
Those newer PCs were probably running a newer version of MS Office. And that's a problem, because Microsoft intentionally leaves out full backward compatability. Thus, once you have one PC with a newer version of Office, it causes a lot of inconvenience, until you are eventually forced to upgrade all of your PCs to the newer version of Office.
But this school chose not to succumb to Microsoft's extortionary tactics, and instead migrated to Linux and OpenOffice. Good for them!
> And why give up the deliciously slick usability of MS software for the clunky, slow, awkward OpenOffice offering?
Well, that just proves that you've never used OpenOffice. I have, and it is just as slick as MS Office.
But even if I had never used OpenOffice, I would still be less inclined to listen to you, and more inclined to listen to the City of Munich, the Government of Brazil, and companies like IBM and Novell, all of whom did an evaluation, and chose to switch to Linux and OpenOffice on the desktop.
> Until the recent betas OpenOffice didn't even have support for word-counts of text selections! Outrageous!
Yes, I know.
And how about that Microsoft Office? It won't even write PDF files! Shocking!
> Even in a communist society you don't get something for nothing (ultimately)...
That's right. And that means that I am never going to get what I want if I let dishonest, lazy monopolies like Microsoft run the IT industry.
On the contrary, in order to get what I want, I have to put out some effort. And that's why I do what I can to support Linux. I am also glad that companies like IBM, Red Hat, Novell, Sun, and Oracle find it profitable to support Linux.
> There's plenty of crap commercial software, but there's an awful lot more more crap free software;
True. And there is also some _excellent_ commercial software (like, say, Visio, or Windows NT 3.51, before Microsoft ruined them), just as there is some excellent Open Source software.
> Commercial software, however, eventually disappears if its crap.
Commercial software can also disappear when it's good, because the company that owns it goes out of business, or stops producing it.
Worse yet, Commercial software that starts out good can degrade, as in the examples of Visio, or NT 3.51, mentioned earlier.
Open Source software, on the other hand, only tends to disappear if no one is using it.
And Open Source software rarely degrades. If the current developers screw up the software, or allow it to stagnate, then someone will fork it, and improve it. The migration from XFree86 to X.org is a good example of this.
> The only reason that free software exists is because of [glory or addictiveness]...
So, you're saying that IBM, Red Hat, Sun, Novell, and Oracle are only contributing to Open Source development for the glory, or to satisfy some programmers' whims. Wow. Have their stockholders heard of this?
But of course, you're wrong. Those companies are into Open Source for the profit it earns them.
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