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Ditto - Songbird instead of iTunes being continually updated with bloatware
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Ditto - Songbird instead of iTunes being continually updated with bloatware
Thanks for that - just installed the Linux version, seems pretty good.
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Open Office - why free?
I don't know. Some people believe that software should be shared and nobody should own it outright. Others use free software to try and tie you into the sale of hardware or lead you into pricey enterprise level software.
Personally, I'm not sure I agree with the free software model. I write software for a living, why on Earth would I wish to work for free?
That said, I do use free software. If they're dumb enough to give it to me for free...
The GNU philosophy goes something like this:
Making a copy of software isn't the same as taking it away from someone, plus controlling the copying of things is a similar strategy the Soviet Union used to prevent freedom of exchange of ideas and information, therefore copyright of software is Stalinist...
www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html
Needless to say, I think that's nonsense...
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Oh and of course, some companies give away the software for free in the vain hope that you'll then subscribe to some online or telephone support service, and make their money from that.
Yeah right.
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Yep I understand that but Open Office is made by Sun a commerical company. When I explain this to customers when they ask me this question I always say it so Sun can try and steal sales of Microsoft but and they can also charge money to developers for support but surely they are still loosing a fortune on it?
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>>..Open Office is made by Sun a commercial company>>
That's not quite correct. OpenOffice has been around for about 21 years; Sun set up the OpenOffice.org project in 2000 and continues to contribute substantially as a community member and providing world-class support and services for OpenOffice.org (StarOffice).
It seems to be regarded that the software is a valuable resource but that Office is still some way ahead overall.
Sun, of course, does provide some other free software.
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Well, personally, I believe its to be commended - you don't feel you're being ripped off by a major corporation which is a rare feeling indeed these days. Of course you can contribute financially towards it's use and I was happy to do so on this machine.
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There are some other sources of similar excellent free software, such as Jarte, a word processor based on Microsoft's WordPad, but more versatile. It's probably more than sufficient for quite a few people, who would be overpowered by more complicated offerings:
www.jarte.com
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Open Office is undoubtedly superb value for money, unbeatable in that criteria alone!
Though MS Office 2007 is undoubtedly much better so is therefore worth spending between £80 ish and £200 ish for depending on which version best suits.
Even £200 over 2 years, that's £2 a week for all that Office can do:
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Its £2 a week I would rather spend on beer. I have not checked for a while but I think the business version which has access etc costs £300.
The best application of Office for me is Outlook and that is the only thing I miss.
I know DSG use Open Office on their terminals.
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Several large companies and organisations I deal with use the word processor part of Open Office when they send me documents via email.
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>Its £2 a week I would rather spend on beer.
What a coincidence you mention beer.
Read "The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin" by Peter Salus.
Groklaw has it online here:
tinyurl.com/2zskbt
You need to understand the difference between Free as in 'Libre' or Free as in 'Gratis'. Free as in freedom or free as in beer.
The Groklaw site documents the extraordinary scheme attempted by a company called Caldera to hijack Linux. Their legal shenanigans started six years ago and if it ever gets to a jury trial, a book I wrote in 1997 may be used in evidence.
Kevin...
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"a company called Caldera"
Better known as SCO, I think?
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>Better known as SCO, I think?
Correct, they changed the company name to The SCO Group for obvious reasons if you know the history.
This case opened my eyes to how badly the american legal system can be gamed by competent lawyers.
Kevin...
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>>Its £2 a week I would rather spend on beer>>
You're not a big beer drinker then?
My club has some of the cheapest Guinness in my area and it's still £2.30 a pint...:-)
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"MS Office 2007 is undoubtedly much better "
In what way? It uses a new, incompatible file format; new, incomprehensible menus; hogs resources and occupies vast tracts of hard disc real estate. The old argument that you needed MS Office for compatibility is now shot down in flames, so you have to wonder why people pay good money for something that they don't need. Unless there really is something useful that 2007 can do that earlier versions (or OO) couldn't...
My favourite substitute is Ashampoo Office, which reads and writes MS formats and can be run from a memory stick, which is a lot easier to carry around than a laptop! It's not free, but it's less than a tenth the cost of MS's version...
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"MS Office 2007 is undoubtedly much better " In what way? It uses a new incompatible file format; new incomprehensible menus; hogs resources and occupies vast tracts of hard disc real estate. The old argument that you needed MS Office for compatibility is now shot down in flames so you have to wonder why people pay good money for something that they don't need. Unless there really is something useful that 2007 can do that earlier versions (or OO) couldn't...
It introduces a new file format in some apps though it's use is optional.
New GUI, once you get used to it (a couple of hours) it is great.
A few hundred MB is of no consequence these days.
Hogs resources? It works very smoothly and efficiently on the four machines I have it running on.
It does everything more efficiently, the only gripe is that Publisher does not use the new GUI, that being said Publisher 2007 is a powerful tool now in 2007 form.
The PDF plugin is brilliant, no/zero/zilch formatting issues, unlike OO.
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"It works very smoothly and efficiently on the four machines I have it running on."
Which are how old? I'm sure it's OK on contemporaneous kit, but I that's also true of Word 97.
In what way does it do "everything more efficiently"? I admit I've only dabbled with it, but it seemed slower than 2003, which I use at one place of work, which itself was slower than the Office 2000 it replaced. I used Word 2000 for years and can't remember ever requiring a non-existent feature.
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Open Office? Pah.
As an experiment, I fished out my old BBC B with a built in Acorn View wordprocessor the other day and sat it next to my PC. I wanted to see how long it took from startup to producing a letter.
The PC, about a year old, and pretty well specced, running Office 2007 under Vista, took over four minutes from power up to being ready to type "Dear Sir" into Word.
The BBC was turned on - prompt appears instantly. You type *word and the word processor is there instantly. It was less than five seconds to get to the same point.
Progress eh?
Obviously I understand the issues over formatting, prettiness, graphics, modern printer drivers etc etc, but if you want to produce a simple letter, and bung it in the post...
Edited by Dipstick on 22/10/2009 at 10:00
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but if you want to produce a simple letter and bung it in the post...
...use a pen and paper? :-)
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"...use a pen and paper? :-)"
Funny you should say that.
Part of my job is on occasion advising elderly academics about their computing needs, and on more than one occasion we have mutually agreed that for a particular small task a notebook from Smiths and a biro is the answer. Instant hard copy, no backup loss, easy to (photo)copy, portable, pocket sized, fast to access, cheap to run, familiar, comfortable to use...
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I've used Word for many years (still with Word 2000) and I doubt if I've ever had to use two per cent of its capabilities in that time.
You can buy books of several hundred pages long describing how to use all its features....:-)
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I've used MS Word since v4.0 IIRC, mostly now using 2003 version, still trying to avoid Office 2007. I use OO 3.1 at home on my Acer Netbook ( 1.6 GHz Intel Atom, 512MB of RAM).
I think OO seems generally quicker and easier to use becuase it doesn't have quite so many bells and whistles as MS Word, for example does OO do all the versioning / approving / sharing stuff Word does?
However, Like I suspect a high proportion of MS Word users, I never use all that fancy functionality, in fact even Word 97 has far more functionality than I need.
So I'd say OO will do the job for the vast majority of home users and a good chunk of corporate users.
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"even Word 97 has far more functionality than I need"
Same here, and I'm a technical author! Also, I find that to write a simple document, like a letter, I much prefer an uncluttered screen, so I reach for something easier, like Jarte or Abiword, both of which are free and light on resources. Actually, Abiword pulls the neat trick of appearing quite simple, but has a lot of facilities built in to the menus. I suspect a lot of people pass it by for looking too basic.
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>> how can they give it away for free?
OO is superb. I believe I read somehwere that commercial organizations which use OO and require support have to pay for that. Which means that it can be free for the rest of us.
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Open office is free for one reason. To dilute the sales of, and hence the profit of Microsoft. The ultimate aim being to marginalise the company.
It is of course dressed up with various phrases to ensure the companies that contributed to its birth and continued health are not saddled with anti trust lawsuits.
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>Open office is free for one reason. To dilute the sales of, and hence the profit of
>Microsoft. The ultimate aim being to marginalise the company.
The reason that Open Office is gaining widespread acceptance is not because it is free of charge. It's because it uses open, published formats for it's files that anyone can implement without paying licence fees or threats of litigation.
Using open published formats means that you can't be held to ransome in ten years time when your new version of a proprietary office package refuses to open your old files or the software company goes bust. It means that if I want to write an audio document reader for the visually impaired I can do so without fear of it being sabotaged by a deliberately introduced incompatibilty.
Every document produced with taxpayers money or part of public record should ONLY be stored in open formats.
>It is of course dressed up with various phrases to ensure the companies that contributed to
>its birth and continued health are not saddled with anti trust lawsuits.
Well, seeing Microsoft as plaintif in an anti trust case would at least make an interesting change ;-)
Kevin...
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The reason that Open Office is gaining widespread acceptance is .. ... because it uses open published formats for it's files that anyone can implement without paying licence fees or threats of litigation.
And there isn't an MS Office for the growing number of Linux users.
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I love OO, and no longer bother with Office at home since my copy of Office Professional refused to be installed any more!
For the first time in a while couple of days ago I found a limitation - somebody sent me some passworded Powerpoint files which OO won't open.
That said, we now have constant problems at work with Office as most people are still on Office 97-2003 and we keep receiving Office 2007 files that we can't open.
There's a view that software will generally go "free" in the same way perhaps that TV is free to air (with advertising). Another free option growing in popularity is Google Apps.
The only paid for software I use at the moment apart from Vista is Paintshop Pro (and I'm not using anything pirated either).
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"Paintshop Pro"
There are some decent free Paint programs, too. I used PSP v4 (from a cover disc) for years and then discovered The Gimp, which is roughly the paint equivalent of Open Office, but for everyday, I use PhotoFiltre, which looks and feels quite like PSP4, but with a few refinements. What really impresses me is that the download is under 2MB - anyone who can program a full photo editor in that amount of space has my respect.
www.gimp.org/
photofiltre.en.softonic.com/
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