This Hot Weather, Openoffice.Org and BSA

I just came in from visiting our merchants and buying some stuff for the office, the only thing I could say is IT'S DAMN HOT OUT HERE!! It's 35° Celsius or 93° fahrenheit according to Yahoo! Weather. It's so hot you can practically fry an egg on the roof of the car.

Now about Openoffice.Org(OOo) as I said I have been visiting merchant all day today and one thing that I find amusing is finding OOo installed in their computers. Why you may ask is that amusing well for one thing this is Microsoft country every single computer here from small internet shop to small/medium businesses even ordinary household has Windows XP Pro and MS Office even if they don't have the money to buy a one... wink wink.

Back to OOo, I've been asking around why they are using OOo and the common answer is that they are afraid that they might get raided by the Authorities and the Business Software Alliance for using pirated software. Lots of small to medium businesses has already been raided by the BSA even internet cafes got raided. Computers containing pirated softwares are confiscated, businesses has to temporarily close down until they pay a huge amount of money to pay the fine. Because of this threat to their business they are now starting to migrate to Open Source Software such as Linux and Openoffice.Org others still uses XP but with OOo as their office suite. Now because of this I feel we should applaud the BSA for cracking down on these companies using pirated software and at the same time thank them for indirectly promoting Opensource Software here in the Philippines.

So until the price of commercial software goes down make mine Open Source!


Categorized: _Web | _Linux