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January 27, 2005
Is c|net Always This Bad?
c|net offers this article on the best "free" software. In theory, that's a great idea for an article, and some of the recommendations are pretty good. But for office software, one of the suggestions is the Student & Teacher Edition of Microsoft Office, which the article acknowledges sells for $150:
Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition 2003 costs about $150 for the same programs as the regular edition. No students or teachers in the house? Consider a "gray market" OEM version of office. It's supposed to be sold with a new PC, but beyond that, it's legal if it has all the spiffy Microsoft holograms.
Legal and free aren't synonymous. That's an awful lot of money for free software*, gray market or otherwise. Did Microsoft pay for this? To be fair, I think the Student Edition is a good deal. You can't purchase upgrades, but the license allows you to install it on three machines. I wish all personal/consumer software licenses were like that. I can't believe I'm praising Microsoft for a licensing scheme, but I am. I paid $135 for the educational version of Office XP, and I wish they had offered the same license at that time.
None of the other recommendations in the article are that exciting. OpenOffice is defnitely passable if you can't afford MS Office, but it's not as smooth overall, and if you share lots of documents back and forth, it's less than ideal. Despite the author's claim to the contrary, you will get complaints from others. The same goes for the GIMP -- the user interface is terrible (even worse than PhotoShop, which I've always found cumbersome for minor tasks), but it's passable and, for free software, fairly powerful. I use a graphic editor rarely enough that I can't justify even the educational price for PhotoShop, which makes GIMP much more attractive than OpenOffice.
The biggest problem with the article, other than the $150=free miscalculation, is simply that the recommendations aren't noteworthy. I'd wager tha the majority of the audience likely to visit c|net and read the article in the first place already knows about almost every program on the list.
* We're actually talking free like "free beer" not like "free speech". See here.
Posted by buddha at January 27, 2005 11:30 PM
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