Tuesday, March 15, 2005 AD
A quick rant about Microsoft
If you are wanting an office suite (word processor, spreadsheet etc) but are dismayed by the licence fees charged by Microsoft, you may be interested in trying out OpenOffice.org, the free (as in both "free speech" and "free beer") office suite based on Sun's StarOffice, and available for Windows, Mac and Linux (in order of increasing quality ;-)).
A beta version of OOo 2.0 is now available for download, and it is a big improvement on 1.1. OOo 1.1 couldn't cope very well with outline-numbered documents from MS Word, but 2.0 does much better.
The only major gap I've noticed compared with MS Word is the lack of a simple cross-reference system for inserting references to other paragraphs. You have to set a manual bookmark for each cross-reference, which is a real pain when drafting legal documents with lots of "subject to clause [x]"-type provisions. But it isn't such a pain that I was prepared to spend the THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY QUID!!! (i.e. $700) that Microsoft expect me to shell out for the basic, standard, stripped-down home edition of MS Office.
As it happens, I did find someone on eBay offering copies of MS Office Professional for £8.49 plus postage, but (call me a suspicious Aloysius) I decided that he probably wasn't a legitimate supplier. And quite apart from the moral objections to software piracy, I've seen Microsoft in action against unlicensed copies of their software: "that'll be the licence fee you should have paid at the time, plus the licence fee that you'd have to pay to buy the software now, plus a bit more to make it a nice round number. And if you don't like it, sue the person who sold you it - who we've just bankrupted". So I'm not going to stick my head through that particular noose, thank you very much.
What's particularly galling is that - since my decision to stick with OOo has ended up being based on price rather than ethics - I've now sacrificed the moral purity of a principled refusal to reward Microsoft for using their secret proprietary .DOC format as a means of forcing people to buy their software, and I'm still having to insert cross-references by hand. From him who has not, will be taken away even the little that he has. *sigh*
Sorry, just needed to get that off my chest. Thank you for your forbearance ;-). But just to reiterate: if you are thinking of buying a word processor etc, then do "beware of expensive imitations", and give OOo a try first.
A beta version of OOo 2.0 is now available for download, and it is a big improvement on 1.1. OOo 1.1 couldn't cope very well with outline-numbered documents from MS Word, but 2.0 does much better.
The only major gap I've noticed compared with MS Word is the lack of a simple cross-reference system for inserting references to other paragraphs. You have to set a manual bookmark for each cross-reference, which is a real pain when drafting legal documents with lots of "subject to clause [x]"-type provisions. But it isn't such a pain that I was prepared to spend the THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY QUID!!! (i.e. $700) that Microsoft expect me to shell out for the basic, standard, stripped-down home edition of MS Office.
As it happens, I did find someone on eBay offering copies of MS Office Professional for £8.49 plus postage, but (call me a suspicious Aloysius) I decided that he probably wasn't a legitimate supplier. And quite apart from the moral objections to software piracy, I've seen Microsoft in action against unlicensed copies of their software: "that'll be the licence fee you should have paid at the time, plus the licence fee that you'd have to pay to buy the software now, plus a bit more to make it a nice round number. And if you don't like it, sue the person who sold you it - who we've just bankrupted". So I'm not going to stick my head through that particular noose, thank you very much.
What's particularly galling is that - since my decision to stick with OOo has ended up being based on price rather than ethics - I've now sacrificed the moral purity of a principled refusal to reward Microsoft for using their secret proprietary .DOC format as a means of forcing people to buy their software, and I'm still having to insert cross-references by hand. From him who has not, will be taken away even the little that he has. *sigh*
Sorry, just needed to get that off my chest. Thank you for your forbearance ;-). But just to reiterate: if you are thinking of buying a word processor etc, then do "beware of expensive imitations", and give OOo a try first.
