GoodSpeed

In today’s computing technology, when you have more horse-power in the cheapest computers on the market than you would’ve dreamed say 5 years ago, one almost ridiculous aspect of the battle between open vs closed source software and open standards vs closed standards is the so called “fight of proving that my application is faster than yours”.

I never believed that one day, the main arguments major players and some analists on the market will bring in attempting to prevent users from trying alternative software solutions would consist in messages like: “if you load a certain big file in my competitor’s program, it will take longer to process it than it does in my applications”. More… from this kind of miss-leading evidence, various analists jump to the conclusion that you should keep your existing applications and not use alternatives available on the market. Funny. Isn’t it ?

Luckily, users understand:

• why such articles are written and they know that trying by themselves the alternative software is the only way of knowing the truth
• they know that even if a certain operation might be a bit slower under some circumstances, milions of users do not even meet that difficulty in usage and are happily computing using that software
• they know they can save lots of money by using alternative open source solutions which do not require licensing costs
• they know the advantages of not being forced to pay again for upgrades
• the advantages of being able to read the documents they have produced in the future too
• they know that open source software is used by milions of users which do not loose their files and work happily and safely

They also know that such articles - which start from a single test or a totally particular usage case and jump to saying a definite NO to an entire application or a whole range of software products full of wonderfull features - are nothing else than FUD.

Take for example the OpenOffice.org set of office applications. It’s free and it is used by tens of milions of people around the world. No payments, no licensing costs, so you can just try it or use it full-time as you wish.

You will notice that this office suite brings to the user all the tools needed to do his office work daily and in the same time proposes a fantastic set of advantages:

• total freedom to download and install on as many computers as you wish or to give copies to anyone
• the possibility to create text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, etc without paying any software license to do it
• the documents you are creating with OpenOffice.org and many other applications are stored in ODF (Open Document Format) which users and administrations begin to discover as having numerous advantages, the best of them being that ODF is an open and standardized XML file format which allows any vendor to create applications to open these files. This way you will be able to choose the application that you like most and use it to open and edit your documents, unlike the current situation on the market where too many are depending on one major vendor.

But where were we ?
Oh at this article which does the miss-leading type of analysis I mentioned above, trying to persuade the readers to stay with the products of a single vendor when it comes to office suite software.

Please read it, then go to http://download.openoffice.org and get a copy of the OpenOffice.org suite for free and test it.

After that, please tell us, how many of the above advantages and more which you will discover investigating what is OpenOffice.org and what is ODF (Open Document Format) really matter for you when comparing with the possibility that on certain machines a certain software be a bit slower under certain circumstances ?

Written by theFUDterrier on April 17th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on FUD detector and OPEN SOURCE WORLD.