Why use Open Source when Microsoft products are so cheap... 10005

OOo saves in standard formats. I send MSO users docs all the time. I just sent off 2 .doc's this morning.

But you don't need MSO to be 'standard' and the MSO format is not really a standard at all, just a widely used format that even some MS products seem to have trouble with. Their own RTF is more of a standard.

They don't have to know it. My kids send in OOo doc's all the time. I doubt the teachers know they were created on OOo. Or care. A history buttignment is a history buttignment, not a MS word use buttignment.

Schools often don't have a standard anyway. Here they have a misture of 9x and XP (and soon maybe SP3) and that's nearly like mixing in linux anyway since the two are hardly the same. Putting OOo on linux boxes at our school would make little difference except maybe some more productivity. The PC's are so screwed up.

Sit anyone in front of any modern WP and they will get by just fine. MSO wants people to think like this. They want people to think they HAVE to use MS products to survive. MS NEEDS people to think like that to survive. It's how they work. It's how they keep up the big margins.

-- - I use linux. Can anyone give me a good reason to use Windows? -