[ Thanks to J
LaCroix for this link. ]
“For the most part, I have found a way around the
closed source requirements of my college. I access the college
website with Firefox, and I use Open Office to create my college
papers and assignments with. With Open Office, I can save documents
as Word documents which generally satisfy their requirements. The
problem is that Open Office doesn’t work as well with the Word
format (currently) as Microsoft Office itself would, and there are
compatibility problems that I sometimes have to deal with.
(Disappearing tables that have caused me to redo entire
assignments, for example).“It hasn’t been completely possible for me to co-exist in this
environment though. One class I took required Visio. Another had
labs that only worked in Internet Explorer. For that reason, I had
to keep a virtualized Windows XP on my Linux laptop, otherwise I
wouldn’t have been able to complete my assignments. Even worse, one
of the classes required me to create an infrastructure for a
fictional business, and almost the entire book focused on Windows.
(For that assignment I created an infrastructure with a mix of
Windows and Linux machines anyway, so there!)”