i am FEE

I am in a country where we are not as rich as our overseas counterparts, but we do nothing to close the economic gap. Take OpenOffice (some opensource software) for instance.Most of our leaders or company directors are scared of open source software!

They spend a lot of money buying software while open source counterparts exist. Everywhere you go, all you see is MS Office. Meanwhile OpenOffice is more than a good alternative to MS Office for office automation.

In other to evade these costs, some companies even encourage PIRATED copies of software. Maybe it works now because companies like Microsoft are not yet interested in many countries in Africa. But I am not sure that will last long.
In order to avoid problems now and then, African companies should consider opensource software.

I was in a conference where there was this guy from SUN, who was presenting some solutions using OpenOffice Impress. He told us at the conference that OpenOffice was free, and one IT guy from a big national company said he could not introduce OpenOffice into his company because every software in his company should be licensed. He was told the Open Office has a free licence, and still then he said the company could not accept something that has not been paid for! And we are in Africa. Where there is still a high degree of poverty.

I mean what does MSOffice do in our African companies, that OpenOffice can't? Typing documents? OpenOffice does that. Spreadsheet functionality? OpenOffice does that. Database functionality ? OpenOffice does that. Presentations ? OpenOffice does that. Maybe Microsoft Office has more functionality. I mean I just checked out Microsoft Office 2007 and it was so cool. I mean their SmartArts is a very cool functionality. But not actually needed for the type of documents we present here in Africa. Ah, unless I am mistaken, you can even blog automatically with MS Office 2007. But how many Africans do blog ?

I think what is killing we Africans is CHANGE. We are not particularly comfortable with change. That is why we have the same political leaders for many years. But I bet if we give OpenOffice a try, we will see that in effect, it provides the same value as Microsoft Office in our African companies at almost zero cost. Perhaps a big mistake will be to brutally migrate all software to opensource software, like the operating system, the mail client, the web browser etc. But I believe Open Office is a good start, in initiating African employees to open source software.

In the company I work, we use OpenOffice 2. It reads MSOffice documents perfectly, and even creates them.
Those who still need the Microsoft Office look and feel when reading their word documents can still install the free MSOffice viewers.

If you haven't yet done so, check out OpenOffice : www.openoffice.org.