After many years of sitting on the fence I have finally come down on the side of the Open Source community.

I have been heard many debates throughout my IT career Word vs WordPerfect, Office vs Lotus, Microsoft vs Apple, MS vs Linux, DOS vs Windows etc. and throughout all those debates I have said that there is a place in the market for all persuasions, but my preference has been for MS products.

However I have become more and more disillusioned over recent years, particularly with the price of MS products and the exchange rate (in the US Microsoft Office 2003 is $499.99 roughly £260 at today’s exchange rate, but the RRP in the UK is £459.99 or $860).

I recently re-built my computer and took the opportunity to erase the hard drives and re-install everything. This is something I do a lot for various reasons, housekeeping, re-builds, general Windows screw-ups, trying out new software etc. Everything went well and as usual the product activation messages came up. Windows I did on-line, but Office informed time there was a problem and I would have to ring to get the product activated. I rang the automated number and typed in the code from Office and that failed. I was then transferred to an operative who told me that I had exceed the number of installations I was allowed and that I was in breach of the EULA. No one told me when I brought the product that I was only allowed to re-install a set number of times (I have read the EULA and cannot find any mention of this) - as an analogy, it is like Ford saying that you can only start you car a set number of times before you need permission to re-start it.

That said I find the products easy to use with a consistent interface, and as I have used them for many years (13) I am very proficient in their application - I have developed numerous applications in Access and Excel, written many documents (Pinco’s 5 year strategy - 200 pages) in Word and Outlook in my default PIM with OE my newsreader of choice. There is functionality in these programs that I use daily , that I haven’t found elsewhere … until now.

I use now Firefox as my web browser (tabbed), Thunderbird with the Lightning add-on as my PIM and newsreader. My Office application is OpenOffice.org (compatible the MS Office except Access). I use Apache/PHP/MySQL for my database applications. I even use EditPad Lite for any text documents I need to create.

There are only 2 things I now need to replace - Media Player because I haven’t found anything I like (any suggestions please except QuickTime - I hate QuickTime). Once that is done then I just need to to learn Linux!!!!

And the reason for the change - all these are licensed free.