I did a good thing yesterday.

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I had my first physics lab of the semester yesterday. I took down all of our ~200 data points by hand, and told the group that I would email them out that afternoon. And so I did - in *.odf format.

I appraised them all in the first email that they would need Open Office to open the file. I told them that it was free, cross platform, and open source. This is the email I got back from one of my lab partners:

Instead of responding that he would have to try sending his email again (because my Bayesian filter had been calibrated to filter out not only emails containing poor grammar but also those from people without laboratory rigor) I instead gave him a direct download link and my reassurances that it was free.

So, I just coerced 3 people into switching to OO. By the end of the semester I'll have them using Firefox!

Ahh, an open office mole! Keep up the excellent work!

Ah... annoy people in your class. You know they can just convert the file. All you may have done is got a few people to download Open Office, not actually use it

My school actually started using OpenOffice to help with cost. Almost everybody seems not to like, which is odd since I switched from MSoffice to OO before this happened!

Their noobs then. If they want to use an inferior product, they can pay the school for the "privilege". Until then, there are FAR better things for the school to spend its money on.

I've been wrestling with this as well- my sister stubbornly holds on to MS Office, even having me VirtualBox XP for her to run the Windows version of Office (she has a Mac). I'll stick with OOo myself, but if others want to pay money when they could get an equivalent or better product for free, that's their business. My university does pass out free copies of MSOffice to students, though.

I'm willing to pay for something good, if I have to. The FOSS doesnt work in all cases, but if I am not using MS office everyday, I cannot really justify it.

When buying things a person should amortize the cost over the life of that product. If its too high.. dont buy.

My computer for example, is worth about 3k new. I expect 3 years out of it, or 1100 days. That is still nearly 3 bucks a day. Not including power and stuff, or software.

On the other hand, I am mulling over ways to reward those FOSS products I use. I will likely fork out a few hundred to Canonical for years of good product with Ubuntu. When I consider that my brother and I both use it, over a few years, it comes to pennies per day, and that money will pay the people who please a lot of others.

A good counter example is my brothers last desktop computer. I put vista on it and now in a year we'll be considering windows 7. At half a dollar a day, its a significant portion of the cost of computing. I dont think windows 7 will be any cheaper.

some people won't appreciate what you've done. You might consider a second copy in a more generic format; .doc (I know, I know.., or .txt, because some people are resistant to change.

Aside from that, it was a generous thing to do.

Oh Lord, I hope they're already using Firefox instead of IE. It frightens me to know how many people actually use something about as secure as the Maginot Line.