USA Today says "Linux waddles from obscurity"

JCallery writes "The Money section of Monday's USA Today carried a feature article entitled "Linux waddles from obscurity to the big time Momentum builds as upstart operating system proves it can compute". It carries a discussion of time and monetary savings in business, basic Sun and Microsoft arguments against Linux, growing popularity with Wall Street, Hollywood, and government organizations, and the credibility of Linux due to alliances with other industry companies."

Comments

Microsoft FUD Parroted

[Steve B]

The main flaw I found in the article was the paragraph:

Microsoft paints Linux as a threat to intellectual property rights. Software developers who make their applications Linux-ready risk losing their proprietary products to the public domain, Microsoft warns.

The lack of rebuttal, and use the word "warns" (which implies a notification of a real threat) rather than a more correct one such as "claims" or "asserts", gives undeserved credibility to this shibboleth.

Re:Linux is the only option.

[swillden]

And yes, you can run MS Office through Wine, or you can use OpenOffice instead, which does a damn fine job of working with MS Office files IME.

And, at least for me, OpenOffice is a *better* tool than MS Office. It has a significant feature that MS Office lacks, which is an open, and easy to use file format. I've recently discovered that the XML files that OpenOffice reads natively are extremely easy to generate programmatically using standard XML tools. I create a lot of highly-structured documents, like legal documents and software design documents, which are a b*tch to make tight and consistent when you have to edit everything by hand.

So, I create custom XML schemas that define tightly structured "documents" in which I only have to define each thing once, and then use XSLT to transform them into other, more "human-readable" formats. The XSLT stylesheets also "expand" them, implementing all of the structure that is useful to human readers, which means the very redundancy that is such a pain to manage manually.

What I've discovered recently is that OpenOffice files are very easy to generate with XML/XSLT (well, and Zip, you need Zip), and they can then be saved as RTF, MS Word, etc. I'm working on some other stylesheets now that will automatically generate OpenOffice presentations from my documents as well (which are easily convertible to PowerPoint, if necessary).

Oh, and OpenOffice is no slouch when it comes to manipulating MS Office files, either.

However, all of this Office stuff is a red herring when it comes to the Linux/Windows debate, sine both office suites run on both platforms.