[olug] goal = FLOSS alternatives at UNO

[Brian Wiese]

On Sat, 13 Dec 2003 09:00:02 -0800 (PST)
CM Miller <cmmiller1973 at yahoo.com> wrote:


|Too bad they don't put any Linux boxes out in the
|computer lab for the general students to 'discover.'  

Thats my whole point with this, and thats the goal... at least a dual boot
option (like whats avail at Ferg hall at UNL - has been for a couple years
now in their computer science/engineering dept) to give 'college students'
at least some exposure to this alternative that is wildly popular now of
course -- I can't pick up a 'tech' journal and not hear about 'Linux'. 
Who would have thought 5 years ago?

I've been looking/waiting for alternatives to the M$ lock-in for a long
time, basically since I attained a 'computing conscious' of what was going
on after using Windoze for a short time -- still I had MS works, everyone
else .doc, and the problem still has not gone away... 

"professor, could you please resend me this document in a non-proprietary
format (like rtf, html, txt, OOo xml...) that doesn't requires me to run
windows and ms office (of which I choose to do neither out of my own moral
conscious choice) -- are you aware of what you are assuming and asking of
me when you send .doc and .ppt files?"  then the obligatory link as found
in my signature...

If we can just pump-up the 'awareness' factor just a bit, I'm sure there's
people just like me 5 years ago -- looking for a ('free' as in free beer
for the most part) quality alternative to M$ Office... and now its so
obvious, but do people even know about it?  Will then even/ever use it if
it's not available on campus for use?  

Most people simply are not aware -- I wouldn't expect them to understand
if theyve only lived in an M$ world all their life -- (trapped in the
matrix =) and all they know is that computing and software = M$; they
assume "doesn't everyone us M$ Office?"  I can't hold their ignorance
against them, we may all have been in the same boat at one time -- but we
can give them an alternative now, so many hackers have worked long and
hard on this over the years to give people this freedom, I can't help but
want to show people the 'choice' they finally have now.  It's the least I
can do, all the 'hard' work has been done... for the most part.
(the red or the blue pill?) =)

yada yada... =) 

Kinda ironic though, the 2 killer apps (imho) are Mozilla and
OpenOffice.org, basically the most widely used tools on a computer these
days (browser and office suite)... but these high quality FLOSS
alternatives both originated from proprietary beginnings (netscape and
star office).

-- 
 Brian Wiese | bwiese(at)cotse.com | aim: unolinuxguru
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