A Rebuttal to "Goodbye, OpenOffice. Nice Knowing You."

[ Thanks to Rex Djere for this link. ]

"I recently read the article "Goodbye, OpenOffice. Nice Knowing You" by Mr. Serdar Yegulalp with great interest. OpenOffice.org has been of particular interest to me of late due to the recent controversy surrounding Oracle's Google lawsuit. I have loved OpenOffice for more than seven years now, and I personally think that it is better than ever. However, Yegulalp's article was very well-written, and he made very compelling arguments as to why he decided to switch back to Microsoft Office after years of using OpenOffice.org, the free software alternative. After reading his article and carefully thinking about his conclusions, I made several observations and I came to my own conclusions about Mr. Yegulalp's experience. In this article, I will reveal those observations and conclusions.

"First of all, he made some very good points. Many people expect software to just work right out of the box. They expect the spell checker to just work, for example. Unfortunately, proprietary software has bred a certain laziness and culture of dependency in people, in my opinion. If you use a piece of proprietary software such as Microsoft Office, the proprietor will always be there to hold your hand. They hope that you decide to stay locked in to their product so that the state of dependency continues from cradle to grave so that they perpetually profit from you."

Complete Story

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• OpenOffice.org: Interactions Between Programs(Sep 16, 2010)
• Goodbye, OpenOffice. Nice Knowing You.(Sep 15, 2010)
• Book review - Learn OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet Macros(Sep 10, 2010)
• OpenOffice.org Conference 2010: preparing the next ten years(Sep 03, 2010)
• 7 Things You Can Do in KDE, But Not in Windows(Sep 02, 2010)