03.13.07
Save Your Hard-Earned Cash By Choosing FLOSS
Erwin Tanenbaum reports that another German city is moving to the OpenOffice.org suite. He reports that the switch to OOo will save around a half-million Euros over a two-year period as compared to migrating to Microsoft Office 2007.
Given the fact that smaller businesses have fewer resources to begin with, those of us who work for their benefit need to move them away from expensive proprietary software, which is often laced with TUR and other anti-user features, and onto user-friendly FLOSS. It is not just the financial investment (licensing cost), but also the upgrade schedules and feature sets. How many times have you come to depend upon a certain feature working a certain way, but then comes an upgrade that does things in a completely different way without any good reason? That meant that the vendor needed another infusion of cash, so they shuffled a few things around and called it a new version of the software.
At WebConnect Consulting, we promise that we will always prefer and advocate the FLOSS solution over a comparable proprietary solution. We believe this is the best thing we can do for the smaller and often-times younger businesses that we are here to help build up. This does not mean that we will not use or select or install or support proprietary software–when it makes sense to do so–however, we believe that FLOSS is the future of software.
When you read about a leading proprietary operating system’s anti-theft technologies making it dangerously unstable and subject to attacks by crackers, ask yourself whether Microsoft is helping you or the recording industry. We believe that once you understand that certain large corporations want to forcibly extract money from you regardless of whether you believe their products are worth their prices, you will join us in buying, using, and advocating FLOSS.
