Quality of Ubuntu List

[Amedee Van Gasse (on Ubuntu mailing lists)]

On Sat, October 10, 2009 19:35, Fred Roller wrote:

>> The Windows ecosystem seems to be proprietary and paid solutions.
>> There is an alternative ecosystem which is cracked and malware-laden
>> software. The alt-alt Windows FOSS ecosystem is growing, but from what
>> I have seen, the pay-for-everything and crack-it ecosystems seems to
>> offer better software [1]. So I don't see that changing anytime soon.
>>
>> [1] I'm not talking about web browsers here. Windows has lots of
>> speciality professional software (Solidworks for instance) that do not
>> have FOSS equivalents. For the average home user, FOSS does seem to
>> provide everything one needs.
>>
>>
>>
> Cracked MS ecosystem is one of the reasons I push linux to folks who
> show an interest.  There is something inherently wrong with needing to
> break the law, no matter the principles, just to do home work or to make
> a living.  It's good to see the FOSS ecosystem growing in MS as this
> allows for a users to become familiar with the FOSS mind set and thus
> easier  to move to linux; especially if MS tends to break those solutions.

+1
I very much support the "Get Legal" campaign of OpenOffice.
And I have lost the count of how many times I have amazed collegues and
bosses at work because I could repair an utterly corrupted Excel or Word
file, just by opening it in OpenOffice and saving it back to .xls or .doc
OOo is also nice to remove those silly passwords from password-protected
worksheets in Excel. OOo does not understand passwords so it just ignores
them. :-D