* James Mohr (suse_mailing_list@jimmo.com) [030611 11:26]: -> ->Granted. But if it is along the lines of "I must provide my proposal in ->MS-Word format because that's what the customer wants and what the competion ->does", then is is economically sound. If I create a presentation that looks ->amaturish because of some "cheap" software when trying to negotiate a $10 ->Million contract, **that** is "extremely economically unsound". At that ->point whether the software licenses cost $20,000 or nothing is really a moot ->point. Well, my boss wrote all of the proposals to the TSA for a contract to provide all of their VPN, Dialup and other such needs in OpenOffice 1.0.1 saving in .doc format and we got that $45 Million dollar contract. He's also communicating back and forth with Microsoft right now in our renegotiations with them over bCentral which we host and all the documents are being exchanged (no pun intended) without any hassle what so ever. The only machines he has are a Sun Ultra10 running Solaris+KDE using OpenOffice and a Toshiba laptop running SuSE and he uses OpenOffice on this machine as well. I'm not to sure what you mean by cheap software not being up to the task. Remember cheap / free doesn't always equal crap. Please be well aware that I'm not trying to get you to switch to anything. You are welcome to use whatever you wish. I could actually careless. I stopped talking to brickwalls quite a long time ago. Some companies / people won't change anything unless they come kicking and screaming. I'm not blaming you or tearing into you personally in anyway. I'm just not fond of statements that are untrue. Open Source software can work quite well, but as with anything else the user must know what they are doing. To muddle through something will cost time, effort and energy that just can't be spent in some cases. It's better sometimes to ease into things so that everything is smooth. -- Ben Rosenberg ---===---===---===--- mailto:ben@whack.org The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other going in the opposite direction.