[ Thanks to Craig Nelson for this
link. ]
“I’ve paid for most of Bill Gates’s garden shed. While the
Microsoft chairman has been busy building his dream techno-home
outside Seattle, I’ve been setting up some small companies’
systems. I need to give every employee word-processing and
spreadsheet abilities and I need these to be compatible with
everyone else’s. And that means using Microsoft Office.“With individual copies of OfficeXP Professional coming in at
around £500, it certainly isn’t cheap. Even with bulk
licences, buying for over 250 people, you should be paying around
£350 per user. For a small or medium-sized company, the fact
that everyone has standardised on Microsoft products provokes
serious costs.“It need not be that way. This month is the second anniversary
of OpenOffice.org–the free alternative to Microsoft’s costly
version. It does the same thing, works on standard documents, and
costs nothing. Zero. Nada. Download it and it’s yours. You can even
copy it and give it to your friends…”