On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 10:19, Charles Hart wrote:
> Try installing a copy of OpenOffice instead.  It is free and does just about
> everything that MSOffice does, except cost money.  It can be found at the
> following URL:
>
> http://www.openoffice.org/

Charles, I really appreciate seeing someone promoting OpenOffice here at
UTC. I use it for every Microsoft Office email attachment I receive, on
Linux no less, and have had no problems to date.

However, what I'd really like to see happen is for the University to
somehow promote it to the larger, and more important, student
population. Students don't always have cash for a legitimate copy of
Microsoft Office, and there are painfully few people telling them about
the free alternatives, like OpenOffice and AbiWord
(http://www.abisource.com/).

Both programs can, within limits, both read and write documents that
work well with Microsoft Word. OpenOffice also happens to handle Excel
and Powerpoint.

And the price is right: $0.

On a another level, these are Free Software (in the sense of
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html and not price) and therefore
free of entangling, costly license agreements. Perhaps, on that count,
these alternatives would be good for the University as well as the
students.

Regards,
matt

PS. Note that the www.gnu.org site is terribly slow lately. Give it time
to load.

--
John V. Matthews, III       \ W: http://www.utc.edu/Faculty/Matt-Matthews
Dept. of Mathematics         \ E: [log in to unmask]
Univ. of Tenn. at Chattanooga \ P: 423.425.4719       Hint: Use GNU/Linux