Posted on 04/20/2009 9:13:09 PM PDT by JoeProBono
Open source can help the bottom line, writes Sean Dodson.
Richard Stallman once wrote that the point about free software is it is "free as in freedom, not free as in beer", meaning people should be at liberty to do as they pleased with software, rather than subscribe to its restrictive licences.
As the economic crisis takes hold, the stress may be on the second half of his aphorism. To the millions downloading free software in an economic crisis, the point is that it is free, as in free beer.
Since Stallman first made his rallying cry as the founder of the free software movement in the 1980s, the way that software has been developed and distributed has been transformed. There cannot be a corner of the industrialised world that does not rely on some form of free software.
But such software, and the open source movement it inspired, has so far affected mostly the back-end world of servers and databases, or taken over from software, such as the web browser, that was already available at no cost.
Remaining largely untouched are the paid-for applications we run on our computers - the operating systems and desktop applications licensed from giants such as Microsoft, Adobe and Apple. But with money becoming increasingly scarce, and the free alternatives growing in sophistication, free is finally threatening to go mainstream.
Take OpenOffice, the leading alternative to a paid-for software application. As the downturn started, its download figures began to rocket. According to Oregon State University, since it launched its third version in mid-October, OpenOffice has been downloaded more than 42 million times. That's roughly four times every second, 13,500 times every hour or 324,000 every day, that someone, somewhere in the world has chosen to download free software, rather than pay for a software application.
"We chose it because of cost," says Chris Waite, the IT director of Travel Republic, a large online travel agent based in England. Listed as the fastest-growing private company in 2007, Travel Republic installed OpenOffice through necessity. It now runs it on all 120 desktops.
"The cost of the Microsoft Office suite is prohibitive, so we chose OpenOffice and it does everything we need," Mr Waite says. "It's saved us about 18,000 ($A38,000). I just wish we'd deployed more open source software from the outset."
Think of any paid-for application and there is now a serious free or open source alternative, each growing in sophistication and putting pressure on the proprietary market leader. Everything from image processing (Gimp), vector graphics (Inkscape) and audio recording (Audacity) to email clients (Thunderbird) - the list goes on. Although none of these applications is yet a market leader, free software has already had one effect on paid-for applications. "The overall price of software has been downwards for several years," says Bianca Granetto, a software analyst for Gartner......
“If you employ a power user you are paying a six figure salary, the cost of MS Office becomes inconsequential compared to its value.”
It again depends on the usage..
I know folks who make a six figure salary that could not tell open office from MS Office..
Your example is aimed at providing two extremes to make Open Office look like a tinker toy. In reality 95+% of MS Office functionality exist in Open Office. For everyone ubt extreme MS-Office power users Open Office is just fine
BTW Open Office is not always playing catchup with MS Office: Which product first allowed you to export natively to PDF? Open Office..
Yea an MS is like an expensive hooker which can give you the clap... Point?
I did not make that connection between ms and clap you need read up the thread and ask them why they made that statement.
I’m in that 95% that doesn’t need the extras that must exist somewhere in MS Office. Open Office has everything I’ve ever needed.
Lately I’ve been using the Go-oo version of Open Office. It’s optimized to open much faster than the regular version of Open Office. It’s version 2.4 something, not the latest 3.xx Open Office.
Then try it again, please. You may like it--you may not. But at least you will be talking from experience, and not from obsolete knowledge. It's like a *nix geek saying windows sucks because Win95 was just a GUI on top of another OS.
I know you didn't. I apologize for not being more clear--or for choosing an imperfect analogy. I was just trying to illustrate how useless out-of-date knowledge is.
The bottom line is however, is that if you are paying someone 6 figures and he/she wants MS Office, you would be nuts not to give it to him/her.
It would depend on what they want to do with it. WP and spreadsheets don't require a $500 piece of software. If s/he is worth six figures, then they are capable enough to learn a slightly different interface from MS 2007 in order to write a memo or produce a presentation.
Agreed. That would be a lot cheaper than paying for his time to re-write everything.
“One of the things about MS Office is that it got a good start on Open Office and people tend to stick with things they know.”
Fair enough, training and comfort cost must be considered when platforming an individual. But the example that you have to be some kid in a village without power in India to get a great experience out of OO is specious at best. Most college students could do just fine with OO. Most people who (1) Have a job which has not revolved around an office sweet, (2) Use of an office sweet is basic, Are part of a much larger group being moved in on OSS direction for cost savings will be just as well off in 1-3 months with either sweet.
Its all going to be situational, new company with no current software load (or growing company) versus an established company with a long term site license.
“In addition, most people are not caught up in the Microsoft is the evil empire stuff that the Unix/Java/Linux crowd is caught up in and that Open Office was created for.”
That’s not what openoffice was created for. It was created to be free not to be ‘ATBM’ Keep in mind at the time when work on Openoffice began there were already well known alternatives to MS such as corel. OO was started by the makers of Star Office in order to have the OSS community help them with the development of their product.
“But I must say that if this was all written in Java and is reasonably stable, that says a lot about the effort that went into it.”
I don’t think it was written in Java until after Sun got into the mix in 2000. But it is pretty stable, and portable.
Certainly, if you find that productivity gains are greater than the ongoing licensing fees and licensing compliance costs (often overlooked, but significant if done right), then it may make sense to pay for the proprietary option.
For the majority of office software users, I seriously doubt that they are going to realize a significant productivity advantage from Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice.org.
There is the retraining cost, but Microsoft, in their wisdom, made Office 2007 significantly different from previous versions of Office, so the Microsoft retraining cost advantage largely disappears.
I wondered if there was a way to use the ASCII codes, but couldn’t find it in the “docs”.
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