Since the ideology of software freedom is still swirling in our heads, this being the week Richard Stallman gave two talks at NUS, let me talk about something at the opposite end. Embracing commercial, paid-for, non-free software. Evil software, so says the GNU man, like Microsoft Office. So, I need to ask, how many of you out there embrace evil software? I don’t specifically go out to embrace non-free software. They usually cost money, and since I don’t print money,…
I recently bought a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Home and Student Edition. It carries a street price of about S$120 in Singapore, which is about the same as what you can get off from Amazon (US$84.99). I get to install it on up to three computers, so actually each installation costs me just S$40 (under US$30). So I was a little irked to find that NeoOffice, which is based on the OpenOffice open source office software, the somewhat equivalent…
Ian Murdock came by in the past week to talk about his open source journey from Linux at Purdue University, founding the Debian project, and now working as the Chief OS Platform Strategist for Sun Microsystems. I suppose he couldn’t help sounding out some of the advantages of Solaris. Things like DTrace, Containers and ZFS are neat. There was a passing comment about how OpenSolaris and the Indiana project was going to make Solaris more friendly. Such as having a…
