Happy International Software Freedom Day!

[Leslie Wright]

Bob Chandler wrote:
> He quickly came to the conclusion that "Open Office" was "good enough"
> for whatever his needs were (quite simple) and so he is no longer
> dependent on Microsoft Office!   The owner is happy not to have a
> customer coming in asking him to pirate software.
OpenOffice continues to impress me, even in its Windows and X11 
incarnations. The retail version of MS Office has been very expensive 
for years and so I have been using an academic version of Office 2000, 
gotten when I was a student, and have never bothered upgrading. I run 
ubuntu as a virtual machine on a brand new iMac, and OpenOffice works 
wonderfully there. Even under the Mac OS proper I find the X11 version 
of OpenOffice looks and works extremely well, though I understand that 
that implementation is not as fully developed yet as the Linux 
version--e.g., the excellent Solver add-in which is a staple of MS Excel 
is really only available for the Linux version right now. I may actually 
make OpenOffice my office suite of choice for Mac OS, though I do note 
that Apple iWork '08 is positively gorgeous and is not expensive--even 
the full retail version is only $80. What I won't bother with is Office 
2004 for Mac. I can legally get the academic version for just over $100, 
but if OpenOffice behaves almost identically and is under continual 
improvement and is free, why throw more money at Microsoft?

Despite its positive reviews and awards I haven't been bowled over by 
AbiWord. I find that the WYSIWYG rendering of documents has font spacing 
issues, and PDF exports can not be viewed outside Linux--the docs just 
show rectangles, not letters. No such issue with OpenOffice in Linux, 
though I have noticed some font size differences. For example,  5 page 
MS Word document using Times New Roman 12 will open in OpenOffice under 
Ubuntu as a 6 or 7 page document. The font size increases, even though 
the font still reports as Times Roman 12-point. I wonder what that is about.

Anyway, three cheers for free software! I have to tell you though what 
Ubuntu needs is a little more user friendliness in the setup. Took me 
ages to get the screen resolution right on when I installed it on my old 
PC, and it took a lot of fancy xorg.conf editing that newbie users 
shouldn't have to endure.

Cheers,

Les