Regained respect for the Freeware world

After I installed openOffice.org I regained some respect for the Freeware world. Now I try out a free software first, do some research into it and if it can meet my demands for the time being I go for it. If I cannot do without a particular SW then I go ahead and buy it. Well, its more fun this way as I'm a software engineer and the first thing I have to do is respect what my fellow colleagues have been developing for us. There are so many freeware utilities out there and Google will help you get them all. Just be sure not to grab some adware programs that say are free and will finally destroy your PCs. Pick your SWs and go for the good ones. Just because they are free you don't have to like it. If they really are standard good replacements of the expensive ones then go for it.

I would love to start a project that is open source and free for all. When can we see the day when most of our personal utility SW is free and open source? Its a pity that I never believed in the free and open world from the time it came into existence. I have lost out on so many grounds of technological breakthroughs that these folks have achieved. I could have been a part of the openOffice.org team, I could have been the part of the Fedora project. I could have...

At work I use a lot of open source/freeware projects - Fedora Core, Bugzilla, PuTTY, CVS, Java and many more... I just love it! Why is it that we all feel only when we pay money we will get a good product. I love Microsoft and I still love Microsoft BUT sometimes they are a tad too expensive.

Out MS Office, Welcome openOffice.org

With MS Office Professional priced so high I had to consider alternatives. Personally I like Office - but sometimes it can be an overkill with so many features bumped into it and pricing it at what it is today. Wish we can get a simple editor that does the same job as what Word does - openOffice.org hit me hard in the head. I never really felt so much for the open world as I always thought the software would be of inferior quality (guys, please don't whack me, forgive me). But now I thought its high time I stopped paying money for the overloaded MS-Office and try out the free openOffice.org and gain some respect in the freeware world.

My only fear was - "Would be completely compatible with the current MS-Office documents I have?" Hmmm, the only option left was to try it rather than keep reading reviews that it was perfectly compatible. Finally I made the call - I installed the openOffice.org suite and was pretty impressed with what those folks have done. Word is now called Writer, Excel is called as Calc, Powerpoint is called as Impress. Wow - nice names and for the first time I felt those names were definitely better than than what Microsoft had named theirs. The installation was a breeze and everything looked fine.

After installation was completed I did try to open a few of my documents and found it was not 100% compatible. Then I thought - "Who cares?" If I can get to open my docs then it is fine. I quickly customized the programs to save automatically in MS compatible formats and I hope it really works as it claims it will be. I was pretty impressed at this I started to love this program that I began gaining interest in driving a similar project in Kannada as a localized project for Internationalization.

To be truthful, the main motivating factor in installing openOffice was my granddad. He needed some editor and spreadsheet utility in his laptop and he was not ready spend 300 bucks on Office. He has loved the SW so far and he has no clue what the differences are - he does not care! I have begun to use it extensively in my pamphlets and brochure creation for the temple and folks have not been complaining about any incompatibilities. Till the day I feel the dire need for MS-Office, openOffice.org is my hero. Until then MS-Office out and welcome openOffice.org!

Good job guys, I love you all.