Re: [MLUG] Fighting the lock-in is hard to do...

[Phillip Kelchen <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thursday 27 July 2006 12:07, Mike Miller wrote:

> So Open Office will make a .doc, but you don't trust it to look right in
> Word?

Not with the footers I had and such. They look a little different in Word- and 
they even look different between Word 2000 on my friend's computer vs. Word 
2003 on campus. I'll export to .doc if there is just basic bold, italic, that 
sort of thing as I know it will work pretty well with all versions of MS 
Word. OpenOffice does an excellent job in reading MS 
Office-made .doc/.xls/.ppt  files, but the opposite is not exactly true.

> Well, they are getting Word for "free" because the University has a site
> license that makes it so that the cost is invisible to individuals and
> departments.  We should work toward getting the knowledgable people to use
> OO, then argue against site licenses.  Once people start to think that
> maybe their beloved site license will go away, and the OO program actually
> works very well, they will have an incentive to switch.

Well, I just learned that not all places are covered by the same site 
licenses. For example, the ag engineering building is not under the site 
license for AutoCAD that EBE and EBW have, so they pay $15k to keep it on 3 
computers over in Ag. Engr. 

Also, most people just use the campus computers for internet, e-mail, and word 
processing. Mostly internet and e-mail. Now why do you need millions of 
dollars of site-licensed software installed on all of those computers? Or 
even Windows? Web browsers work just as well on Linux as they do in Windows, 
and you can type up and print or e-mail paper to be used internally in the 
campus (as almost are) the same in OO as in MS Office. So why don't we just 
put all of the proprietary stuff in only a few labs (i.e. AutoCAD in MAE 
labs) and then on a terminal server a la Software Anywhere and switch all of 
the workstations to Linux/OO and save ourselves millions of dollars? 

> Things are going well -- better than I would have expected 5 years ago.

I'd say. I was barely even aware of Linux five years ago. I think I had read 
an article about Red Hat somewhere- that's about it. Probably had something 
to do with being on dialup with 5 other people wanting to use the one 
computer we had. Now I use it daily and would never think of using a non-OSS 
UNIX-based OS.

Phillip

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