Microsoft Record fine
I read with interest that Microsoft has been hit by a record fine (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7266629.stm) for anti-competitive behaviour.
It’s interesting for me - I now read these stories with more open-ness - I used to work for Microsoft for 5 years, and in them days I had very little understanding of open source programs and why we should be sharing our code with people.
I’m not going to sound like a convert just because I’ve started using Open-Source. After all competition is what business is all about. And if they are good at something, then bravo!
That said, I can certainly see a case for stopping them getting too powerful. I mean - it’s not really fair for them to keep buying up companies and incorporating that application into the operating system is it? What chance does the little software house have? (Actually I also remember trying to fix a problem on a computer - what I wanted to do was remove Outlook Express from the installation for reasons that I won’t go in to - but it’s impossible! That did irritate me).
Anyway -without going on, I’ve now been using Ubuntu for over a week now (my biggest and closest experience of Open Source so far). The thing that amazes me, is just how good it is. It looks like a real operating system and feels like one. And the OpenOffice application (equivalent of MS Office) is as good as the MS version for my needs - in fact some of the features are really neat, though maybe I never found them on my Windows machine.
There’s another thing that I’m really impressed with - how easy it is to find open source software. Try finding a free PDF writer on Windows. It means a hell of a lot of trawling of websites that Google has found you - even if you find one that is genuinely free there is so much dross out there that you inevitably have to waste so much time finding one - I’d even happily pay a little for something that’s decent but it’s still hard to find. With this, you just go to “Add/Remove Programs” and you’re presented with an up to date list of programs that you can install (or remove without fuss) (not just a handful of programs, but seemingly hundreds of them). If I wanted an ftp client for example, I could search on “ftp” and I’d be presented with anything that has ftp capabilities, with a popularity rating and description.
I still don’t fully understand how open-source manages to be free. There must be thousands of hours gone into many of these apps, so how do they support themselves. But what I can see is how it can improve your productivity for a small business like us. I mean, we have been writing websites on Apache servers, using PHP and MySQL for around 3 years. Now I’m using an open-source operating system, and finding so many cool tools that I can use - and it runs so damn quick!!