Victor,
Yes, the lure of free beer is good. Wouldn't it even be more interesting to
have "Your cake and eat it too", in a sense.
Since the source code is available, simply use it to learn and implement to
a level where U as an administrator (developer by force) or investor can be
able to improve / tweak it for U'rself and those who don't yet have the
skills or desire and the get paid for doing what U love or did in U'r own
time.
As U know the Linux World is based on free collaborations and tweaks.
Sixteen Years ago (1990) Linus was tired of the contraints of the MINIX and
UNIX world and thus decided to try and improve the current systems he was
using while providing a chance for others to help and benefit. He is now
living large in the Silcon Valley and still "controls" the Core of Linux.
FRANCIS.
=========================================================================
Victor van Reijswoud writes:
And as Wire once told us, at a FOSS awareness conference (FCIT, MUK)
FOSS is not necessarily free beer.
But we also like free beer, or not!
Victor
Prof Dr. Victor van Reijswoud
B.P. 1474 Bujumbura - BURUNDI
[P] +257 928246
[W] www.eacoss.org
[B] open-africa.blogspot.com
On 30 Aug 2006, at 18:19, Francis Musinguzi wrote:
YES, Tell them; FOSS OYee !!!.
I was also suprised by OO.org's abilty to near perfectly reproduce and
transfer most of the MS Office formats. It also has the advantage of
having default PDF (which MS is copying into the Office 2007 release)
and XML export support, plus the future. (ODF)
Support for the Open Document Format, which is being hyped as the next
standard for document formating, is a big plus for OO.org. It should
allow one to move documents from one proccesing suite to another
regardless of architecture and user-specific formating.
FOSS has the advantage of having more people listening and solving
arising issues, in less time than closed source. There is even the
advantage of "boxing" your implemenation (being paid for doing it
quicker and support) while providing the source code for improvement.
Most of the "Successful" software developers have discovered these
benefits and now provide a boxed and open form of their products. FOSS
keeps getting better and better.
This what I would suggest for all serious FOSS developers in Uganda. Do
not fret over copyright. Just simply provide a way of implementing it
faster and providing stable support faster, while letting more heads
tinker with and rid your software of bugs. If SuSE, Redhat and the like
can capitalize on it why cant U ???
And as Wire once told us, at a FOSS awareness conference (FCIT, MUK)
FOSS is not necessarily free beer.
FRANCIS.
======================================================================
====
Ernest, B.M (AfriNIC - ZA) writes:
out of curiosity, i decided to give staroffice 8.0 a try, and find out
if it's worth the 80USD (compared to the free openoffice 2.0)
after about a month, i can say that openoffice might be better than
staroffice (apart from a few missing fonts - the proprietary ones i
guess).
where OO.org shines very well is importation of microsoft office
documents. though not perfectly, it does much better at keeping them
closer to their original than staroffice.
so, why the 70 usd, when the free package is much better?
e
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