See inline > -----Original Message----- > From: James Elliott [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 8:53 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [users] Long live Bill Gates!.?
> making as much money out of the Internet community as It is not about "Internet community". They were doing it before such thing as "Internet community" came into existence. And making money for their shareholders is their lawfull duty, so nothing wrong with that. > <snip> > On the other hand, Open Office is genuinely concerned with > helping all members of the Internet community, rich or poor, > to get the most out of their computers, and there are many > other open source software groups with similar aims. This maybe true for individual volunteers, but I do not think that Sun had this in mind when buying StartOffice. And I am sure Sun's marketing department has totally different goals in their job descriptions. Nonetheless, we all love OpenOffice and developers working on it. > > You may well say "Long live Bill Gates", and he may well do > so, but Microsoft's days at the top are numbered. The > corporation will be around for a while yet, but once the > public is educated in the ways of Linux, Open Office, AVG, > The Gimp, and so on, who will want to spend many hundreds of OK, here is my take on that - only open source products backed by established software companies (or at least started from commercial products) have usability necessary to penetrate desktop. Let's compare Gimp and OO: 1. OO comes as nice Win installer, which does everything for user. Gimp requires separate GTK installer and not only that, but GTK+ installer is created by enthusiasts, not main GTK+ project. Why? Because main developer is not interested. Besides that, last released Win32 version is 2.8.20, whereas *nix is 2.10.3. Why? Because they hit some problem with Win and decided not to release. 2. Interface. Let's take just one example - GIMP's (or rather GTK's) Save dialog. It is awfull, no other way to discribe it's look, feel and functionality. And let's compare with OO, which uses standard Windows dialog, which is functional, well polished and very familiar to the user. Also take many dialogs in Linux GUI - it is pain to see screen real estate wasted for space between controls and at the same time not be able to fit in 800x600. Compare that to OO - nicely designed GUI (with the room to improve), pleasing eye and making user comfortable. Regards, K. Palagin. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
