And because it is a civil offence (against a thing rather than a person), it carries no custodial sentences. By all means fine the perpetrator, take away their house and sell it to recoup losses, but there needs to be a clear distinction in our society that acts against a person are far more serious than those against a corporation.
Let me put it this way to you - Adam and Eve did not ensure that humanity was banished from the Garden of Eden for eternity by taking a bite from the forbidden Google.
I like BASH as much as the next guy but I find it easier to *JUST NOT BUY SHIT MUSIC*.
That way, when I buy a really good CD, I get a nice warm fuzzy feeling about what great value £10 is for a piece of music that I may be listening to for the next 30 years plus and then feel more than happy to go buy another some time later.
I can then rip it to my heart's content, store it on a shelf as it's own backup, drop my trousers and wave my big fat hairy arse at lossy "pick 'n' mix" sweetie music & pointless iCloud technologies designed merely to part the incredibly dumb of yet more of their hard-earned cash.
You are trying to argue semantics and failing dismally.
A corporate employee (or any human being) who is robbed of personal possessions is the victim of a crime and the perpetrator of the crime worthy of a jail sentence.
A corporation is not a living entity and therefore robbery of the corporation is a civil crime.
Does that explain it in simple enough terms for you now?
All you fanbois on here constantly whining on about the anti-Apple sentiment on Slashdot, why not do something positive for your public image and start sending emails to your beloved Apple Corp. explaining that, as a user of their products, you're not prepared to put up with this outrage and expect Apple to step in and maybe start launching some appeals to the Chinese government to get these custodial sentences?
Whoops, sorry, was getting ahead of myself for a moment, please forgive me.
Of course you can't do that because to do it you need backbones.
They committed a "crime" against a huge, faceless corporation, they did not rob, rape, murder or affect any individual human being in any way whatsoever.
Therefore, that makes this a civil matter, not something that should IN ANY WAY involve law enforcement officials or carry any custodial sentences.
Any time I'm asked to set up a new desktop or laptop PC for friends or family, the Norton Trialware in the first thing I remove and install free anti-virus like Microsoft Security Essentials or AVG.
I'm sick off TV ads where Symantec and other commercial security software vendors give the impression they are a one-stop solution to user ignorance with their over-rated bloated packages designed to do little more than to get you to hand over a credit card number for their subscription.
Frankly, I've had much better results installing the free stuff and then sitting down with the new PC owners for a 1/2 hour explaining the perils of downloading and running warez or opening an unknown email attachment.
If spammers suddenly discovered that sending out millions upon millions of unsolicited emails generated no revenue whatsoever because nobody ever opened them, then spam would stop overnight as the spammers would have to go and find new ways to make money.
On the basis that spam has not stopped, I think it's safe to assume that there are still lots of people out there interested in buying viagra or bigger willies from some complete stranger on the other side of the world, even though very few (if any) of those knuckle-draggers ever probably ever come here on Slashdot. (Fanbois, zealots and geeks - yes. Pedos, knuckle-draggers and estate agents, no.)
Stated in those terms, do you see now why it is perfectly feasible that there are computers out there with absolutely no virus checking on them that haven't been updated for nigh-on a decade.
It's really easy to explain - Oracle are like Microsoft and Apple in that they believe that selling proprietary technologies is their best business model, whether or not you or I believe that to be the right thing for them to be doing.
Oracle are a database company, a "half-proprietary half-Open" office package would have been seen by them as a weird oddity that just didn't fit into their business model. They don't really compete with Microsoft because even MS-SQL doesn't play in the same high-end database space that Oracle does, and CRM, the other space Oracle plays in with Siebel has no comparable Microsoft product.
A lot of that possibly has to do with the fact that Larry Ellison and Bill Gates were rumoured to have the utmost hatred of each other, Ellison's now one of the richest men in the world, he's knocking on a bit and sees no reason to start pissing Microsoft off.
But then why would anyone have expected anything different the moment it was announced that Oracle had bought Sun?
Oracle is a database company and Sun provided them with some great hardware and software platforms to throw those databases on, hence the logic behind the purchase.
But Oracle have never had any interest in working in the desktop applications space so it's no surprise that they have no interest in OpenOffice.
If anything, Sun were never really THAT serious about StarOffice/OpenOffice, it always seemed like it was more of a sideline past-time for them just in case anyone came to them asking to run Solaris on desktops rather than servers - whereupon they could pull out Star Office as a justification for doing so.
If they were going to release it into the wild at the end, they should have done so at the beginning.
With all respect, I think if you went and read up on the history of StarOffice / OpenOffice / LibreOffice a little, you'd realise how silly it is to make the above comment.
StarOffice started out as a commercial office package by StarDivision, Sun bought StarDivision and then released the source code to StarOffice in 2000. That allowed OpenOffice to be created and maintained as a free office package by an external community, whilst Sun took bits of the new code & some proprietary stuff to still work on StarOffice for a while. Then Oracle bought Sun in 2009, demonstrated they have little interest in office packages and discontinued it in April of this year.
So if you seriously believe StarDivision or anyone else in the above complex chain of events should have been able to predict it, you probably need to go get some help!
They fail to understand the advantage that MS Office integration brings in MS's SQL Server and other server strategy.
Can you explain this more clearly as I fail to see the point you are making? You access any database software with appropriate connectors using something like ODBC and provided the client software has that ODBC connectivity, then anything can access it to throw queries at it.
I'm not a DB admin by any stretch of the imagination but I always understood that because Microsoft was so keen to get MS SQL adopted by enterprises, that they made a fairly good job of building in ODBC support so that you could get virtually anything to talk to it.
From an MS Office perspective, integration means you can do things like mail merges from an MS SQL or use Access as a front-end to it - but I'm not aware that any part of that is particularly proprietary integration to MS-SQL and that you can basically do the same things with other non-Microsoft client front-ends.
OpenOffice is the one thing that MS sales reps really hate. A few million investment can have a big impact on MS's bottom line.
Is this not precisely in the same league as a Volvo car salesman hating Lexus cars, or a McDonald's restaurant manager hating Burger King? It's called COMPETITION, it affects profits and therefore the sales reps bonus - they are hardly going to be subjective about OpenOffice now, are they? No matter how good it is!
I think we have to just agree to disagree on that - it's interesting to see that an iPad VGA converter exists but then I could also argue why would I pay more money for a cable that converts to something that already exists on my laptop/netbook.
I think it really comes down to the fact that I see mobile OSes as precisely just that - ideal for working on small touchscreens, whether Android, iOS, Blackberry, whatever.
But anything bigger than that then I'm faster and more comfortable with a mouse and keyboard GUI and don't see why having to re-learn a new graphics interface just to do stuff that I can already do on a traditional laptop or netbook justifies the expense of a tablet.
Incidentally, I'm mostly a Linux person and whilst I've never used Ubuntu as my main distribution, I did quite like messing about with it occasionally until they brought in the Unity interface on the latest 11.04 release which, if you don't know, mimics Android and iPhone interfaces. I tried it and hated it immediately because it just doesn't work as a better replacement for a traditional keyboard and mouse on a "standard" sized computer screen.
Actually, porn is widely attributed to be the reason as to why Betamax failed and VHS didn't - it has nothing to do with technical superiority of one over the other.
When Sony launched Betamax, they did not want their corporate branding associated to pornography so refused to let the porn studios release Betamax versions of the movies. No such restriction was placed on VHS, the market was flooded with porno on VHS and that's how it won.
Incidentally, I've nothing personal again Blackberries, the missus had one for a while and it was a neat little device that's perfect for integration with business email and collaboration.
But the market is changing. There was a time when I didn't mind carrying about and updating three mobile phones (one for home use, one for business and, because I was out in Spain a lot at the time, one on a Spanish mobile provider) because they were simple phones that just got on with it. But nowadays, smartphones and BB do so much that you spend a lot of time configuring them correctly, downloading apps, etc. etc.
For people like me, that means I just want to use one device for everything, a whilst a BB works fine for the business side of things, it falls down on all the personal stuff I want to do with my phone.
The blackberry is still far superior for Exchange email and calendaring than any Android or iPhone device that I've tried.
You're probably right but the fact of the matter is that the world is moving away from just Exchange and calendars to collaboration and tying in several different messaging protocols like email, IM, VoIP, video and cellular comms into one single client on a mobile device - so, for example, you can be halfway through a conference call on your business phone, decide you need to leave the office and seamlessly transfer the call to you cellular phone. Or maybe have voicemails emailed to you as attachments. Or register what communications protocols you have available for others to contact you on by using SIP presence.
The company I work for does all that kind of stuff and whilst there are Blackberry clients for all that stuff we do, they also exist for iPhone and Android.
So what I'm trying to say is that Blackberry may well have provided unparalleled connectivity to Exhange email and the like up to this point in time, but because business communications are themselves changing, software manufacturers like us treat BB, iPhone and Android with equal importance and therefore BB now has to compete at the same level with those other devices.
Point taken about the botnets but for the paid mail server comments I made, I wasn't talking about changing any of the existing SMTP/POP3/IMAP/etc. protocols that are currently used, more front-ending the account creation with a refundable deposit system so if people create as many accounts as they want to willy-nilly then it's going to cost them heavily. Surely a spammer is going to not want to pay an upfront cost and is definitely not going to want to hand over a credit card number that can track back to him/her.
I'd also argue the point that a normal email user would never need to use a mass-mailing program anyway (I've only ever used them in lab environments to test with in my system security role) and services like Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail are aimed at home, not business users.
I think your third example is the strongest one and I really cannot argue with that as a clear advantage of a tablet over anything else.
Lectures? I think I have to give you that one, I've not been in educational classes for more than a quarter of a century, I've grown up with a keyboard and am probably too old now to ever think a touchscreen is any where near as good - but the young whippersnappers of today seem to have lightning fingers when it comes to phone texting where I thinks it's much easier to make a phone call, so they are also a lot faster than I am on a touchscreen keyboard. So I can't speak for their preferences, for me a touchscreen would be slower.
Meetings? I disagree on that one - whether you're using a laptop or a tablet, your attention on the device is no different. Plus I frequently come across scenarios where someone else is presenting on a projector, a discussion results about a topic, one member of the audience says "Here, have a look at this" then plugs his laptop into the projector to show to the room - something you can't do with a tablet directly.
Incidentally, my beef with commercial software is not that the applications themselves are binary-only, closed-source applications but that, in many cases, the file formats that they use are proprietary.
Microsoft really has no right to complain about the number of viruses that have plagued Windows in the past (I've not used Windows 7 but I'll assume it does a much better job of restricting virus spread based on what I've read about it) if they insist on constantly "having their cake and eating it".
They want to charge high prices for their market-dominating products and keep the file formats those products use as proprietary so that an Open Source application cannot use those formats properly, thus forcing people who simply will not spend $130+ on an Office package to go down the virus-ridden warez route. So they really only have themselves to blame if Windows has had a reputation for poor security.
OOO's advantages (free & portable) are of no interest to a business. A copy of MS Office for business costs between $130 [pbdistributiononline.com] and $180. This is not even in the noise - it doesn't register. This is what an hour of work of a not very highly paid engineer costs to a business.
There's no denying that MS Office is the defacto standard currently and I too doubt that OOO or LibreOffice will see any penetration in business environments whilst the majority of them remain Microsoft shops.
But not every personal user has between $130 and $180 to spend on an office application, especially if you're just firing it up once a week to open a spreadsheet for your home accounts.
And sure, in business circles, lots of people need clever macros and VB embedding inside documents that clearly a free alternative package cannot provide - but those features, and many other advanced MS Office features, aren't needed by most casual users.
I used to be the guy amongst my circle of friends and family who could get them any "dodgy" software they wanted but over the past five years or so, I've gone more and more to Linux at home anyway where I've had the chance to play with a lot more Open Source software, including OOO and now LibreOffice. I still use Windows XP but use the same OSS apps on it as on Linux, where possible, for compatibility reasons.
I also made a decision then that I was going to stay legal, if only because I was getting sick & tired of the number of viruses I was installing onto my Windows boxes with all the warez stuff I was using, and that therefore I would either use free software or buy/register any commercial software that I needed to use. I do have about a half-dozen commercial applications that I use in Windows at the moment for which OSS does not have any equivalents of equal quality. Since that time, I've not seen a single virus on any of my Windows machines.
Similarly, when friends and family came to me for dodgy software after that point in time, I'd recommend them to a piece of free software to install and, if they weren't happy with that, to go buy the commercial equivalent with the functionality they needed. Again, I've fixed far fewer of their PCs since then because they've had nowhere near as many damaging viruses as they used to have, and many of them are using OOO and are quite happy with it.
It strikes me that if everyone took the attitude of paying for the software they use or using a free equivalent, the Internet would be a lot less inundated with viruses and bots than it is today. And whilst I use Open Source more than commercial software, I consider a computer to be a productivity and entertainment tool and everyone wants to use the best tool for the job they need to do - sometimes that's freeware, sometimes that's commercial software, and that's why there's room for both to co-exist side-by-side.
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Correct in both cases.
And because it is a civil offence (against a thing rather than a person), it carries no custodial sentences. By all means fine the perpetrator, take away their house and sell it to recoup losses, but there needs to be a clear distinction in our society that acts against a person are far more serious than those against a corporation.
Let me put it this way to you - Adam and Eve did not ensure that humanity was banished from the Garden of Eden for eternity by taking a bite from the forbidden Google.
It would be interesting to know if they are paying RIAA off out of the revenue from the iCloud service.
I would suggest that Steve Jobs is probably feasting hungrily on the RIAA's barbed black cock as we speak.
I like BASH as much as the next guy but I find it easier to *JUST NOT BUY SHIT MUSIC*.
That way, when I buy a really good CD, I get a nice warm fuzzy feeling about what great value £10 is for a piece of music that I may be listening to for the next 30 years plus and then feel more than happy to go buy another some time later.
I can then rip it to my heart's content, store it on a shelf as it's own backup, drop my trousers and wave my big fat hairy arse at lossy "pick 'n' mix" sweetie music & pointless iCloud technologies designed merely to part the incredibly dumb of yet more of their hard-earned cash.
Yep, they can have a pat on the back for this one... though I still haven't forgiven them for the 1997 bailout of Apple.
You are trying to argue semantics and failing dismally.
A corporate employee (or any human being) who is robbed of personal possessions is the victim of a crime and the perpetrator of the crime worthy of a jail sentence.
A corporation is not a living entity and therefore robbery of the corporation is a civil crime.
Does that explain it in simple enough terms for you now?
All you fanbois on here constantly whining on about the anti-Apple sentiment on Slashdot, why not do something positive for your public image and start sending emails to your beloved Apple Corp. explaining that, as a user of their products, you're not prepared to put up with this outrage and expect Apple to step in and maybe start launching some appeals to the Chinese government to get these custodial sentences?
Whoops, sorry, was getting ahead of myself for a moment, please forgive me.
Of course you can't do that because to do it you need backbones.
The AC above is a fanboi.
The AC above is a 'fanboi'.
Nope, can't see a difference.
They committed a "crime" against a huge, faceless corporation, they did not rob, rape, murder or affect any individual human being in any way whatsoever.
Therefore, that makes this a civil matter, not something that should IN ANY WAY involve law enforcement officials or carry any custodial sentences.
...one hacking group with small willies meets another hacking group with tiny penises.
And I'm I supposed to be prostrating myself at his feet at this point due to his phophetic abilities to predict the future?
Any time I'm asked to set up a new desktop or laptop PC for friends or family, the Norton Trialware in the first thing I remove and install free anti-virus like Microsoft Security Essentials or AVG.
I'm sick off TV ads where Symantec and other commercial security software vendors give the impression they are a one-stop solution to user ignorance with their over-rated bloated packages designed to do little more than to get you to hand over a credit card number for their subscription.
Frankly, I've had much better results installing the free stuff and then sitting down with the new PC owners for a 1/2 hour explaining the perils of downloading and running warez or opening an unknown email attachment.
Look at it another way...
If spammers suddenly discovered that sending out millions upon millions of unsolicited emails generated no revenue whatsoever because nobody ever opened them, then spam would stop overnight as the spammers would have to go and find new ways to make money.
On the basis that spam has not stopped, I think it's safe to assume that there are still lots of people out there interested in buying viagra or bigger willies from some complete stranger on the other side of the world, even though very few (if any) of those knuckle-draggers ever probably ever come here on Slashdot. (Fanbois, zealots and geeks - yes. Pedos, knuckle-draggers and estate agents, no.)
Stated in those terms, do you see now why it is perfectly feasible that there are computers out there with absolutely no virus checking on them that haven't been updated for nigh-on a decade.
Yes, AND they can get off my bloody lawn as well, before I set the dogs on them.
It's really easy to explain - Oracle are like Microsoft and Apple in that they believe that selling proprietary technologies is their best business model, whether or not you or I believe that to be the right thing for them to be doing.
Oracle are a database company, a "half-proprietary half-Open" office package would have been seen by them as a weird oddity that just didn't fit into their business model. They don't really compete with Microsoft because even MS-SQL doesn't play in the same high-end database space that Oracle does, and CRM, the other space Oracle plays in with Siebel has no comparable Microsoft product.
A lot of that possibly has to do with the fact that Larry Ellison and Bill Gates were rumoured to have the utmost hatred of each other, Ellison's now one of the richest men in the world, he's knocking on a bit and sees no reason to start pissing Microsoft off.
But then why would anyone have expected anything different the moment it was announced that Oracle had bought Sun?
Oracle is a database company and Sun provided them with some great hardware and software platforms to throw those databases on, hence the logic behind the purchase.
But Oracle have never had any interest in working in the desktop applications space so it's no surprise that they have no interest in OpenOffice.
If anything, Sun were never really THAT serious about StarOffice/OpenOffice, it always seemed like it was more of a sideline past-time for them just in case anyone came to them asking to run Solaris on desktops rather than servers - whereupon they could pull out Star Office as a justification for doing so.
If they were going to release it into the wild at the end, they should have done so at the beginning.
With all respect, I think if you went and read up on the history of StarOffice / OpenOffice / LibreOffice a little, you'd realise how silly it is to make the above comment.
StarOffice started out as a commercial office package by StarDivision, Sun bought StarDivision and then released the source code to StarOffice in 2000. That allowed OpenOffice to be created and maintained as a free office package by an external community, whilst Sun took bits of the new code & some proprietary stuff to still work on StarOffice for a while. Then Oracle bought Sun in 2009, demonstrated they have little interest in office packages and discontinued it in April of this year.
So if you seriously believe StarDivision or anyone else in the above complex chain of events should have been able to predict it, you probably need to go get some help!
They fail to understand the advantage that MS Office integration brings in MS's SQL Server and other server strategy.
Can you explain this more clearly as I fail to see the point you are making? You access any database software with appropriate connectors using something like ODBC and provided the client software has that ODBC connectivity, then anything can access it to throw queries at it.
I'm not a DB admin by any stretch of the imagination but I always understood that because Microsoft was so keen to get MS SQL adopted by enterprises, that they made a fairly good job of building in ODBC support so that you could get virtually anything to talk to it.
From an MS Office perspective, integration means you can do things like mail merges from an MS SQL or use Access as a front-end to it - but I'm not aware that any part of that is particularly proprietary integration to MS-SQL and that you can basically do the same things with other non-Microsoft client front-ends.
OpenOffice is the one thing that MS sales reps really hate. A few million investment can have a big impact on MS's bottom line.
Is this not precisely in the same league as a Volvo car salesman hating Lexus cars, or a McDonald's restaurant manager hating Burger King? It's called COMPETITION, it affects profits and therefore the sales reps bonus - they are hardly going to be subjective about OpenOffice now, are they? No matter how good it is!
I think we have to just agree to disagree on that - it's interesting to see that an iPad VGA converter exists but then I could also argue why would I pay more money for a cable that converts to something that already exists on my laptop/netbook.
I think it really comes down to the fact that I see mobile OSes as precisely just that - ideal for working on small touchscreens, whether Android, iOS, Blackberry, whatever.
But anything bigger than that then I'm faster and more comfortable with a mouse and keyboard GUI and don't see why having to re-learn a new graphics interface just to do stuff that I can already do on a traditional laptop or netbook justifies the expense of a tablet.
Incidentally, I'm mostly a Linux person and whilst I've never used Ubuntu as my main distribution, I did quite like messing about with it occasionally until they brought in the Unity interface on the latest 11.04 release which, if you don't know, mimics Android and iPhone interfaces. I tried it and hated it immediately because it just doesn't work as a better replacement for a traditional keyboard and mouse on a "standard" sized computer screen.
Actually, porn is widely attributed to be the reason as to why Betamax failed and VHS didn't - it has nothing to do with technical superiority of one over the other.
When Sony launched Betamax, they did not want their corporate branding associated to pornography so refused to let the porn studios release Betamax versions of the movies. No such restriction was placed on VHS, the market was flooded with porno on VHS and that's how it won.
Incidentally, I've nothing personal again Blackberries, the missus had one for a while and it was a neat little device that's perfect for integration with business email and collaboration.
But the market is changing. There was a time when I didn't mind carrying about and updating three mobile phones (one for home use, one for business and, because I was out in Spain a lot at the time, one on a Spanish mobile provider) because they were simple phones that just got on with it. But nowadays, smartphones and BB do so much that you spend a lot of time configuring them correctly, downloading apps, etc. etc.
For people like me, that means I just want to use one device for everything, a whilst a BB works fine for the business side of things, it falls down on all the personal stuff I want to do with my phone.
The blackberry is still far superior for Exchange email and calendaring than any Android or iPhone device that I've tried.
You're probably right but the fact of the matter is that the world is moving away from just Exchange and calendars to collaboration and tying in several different messaging protocols like email, IM, VoIP, video and cellular comms into one single client on a mobile device - so, for example, you can be halfway through a conference call on your business phone, decide you need to leave the office and seamlessly transfer the call to you cellular phone. Or maybe have voicemails emailed to you as attachments. Or register what communications protocols you have available for others to contact you on by using SIP presence.
The company I work for does all that kind of stuff and whilst there are Blackberry clients for all that stuff we do, they also exist for iPhone and Android.
So what I'm trying to say is that Blackberry may well have provided unparalleled connectivity to Exhange email and the like up to this point in time, but because business communications are themselves changing, software manufacturers like us treat BB, iPhone and Android with equal importance and therefore BB now has to compete at the same level with those other devices.
Just to let you know that I with my dirty little mind smirked at your comment, even if it appears nobody else did. :-)
Point taken about the botnets but for the paid mail server comments I made, I wasn't talking about changing any of the existing SMTP/POP3/IMAP/etc. protocols that are currently used, more front-ending the account creation with a refundable deposit system so if people create as many accounts as they want to willy-nilly then it's going to cost them heavily. Surely a spammer is going to not want to pay an upfront cost and is definitely not going to want to hand over a credit card number that can track back to him/her.
I'd also argue the point that a normal email user would never need to use a mass-mailing program anyway (I've only ever used them in lab environments to test with in my system security role) and services like Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail are aimed at home, not business users.
I think your third example is the strongest one and I really cannot argue with that as a clear advantage of a tablet over anything else.
Lectures? I think I have to give you that one, I've not been in educational classes for more than a quarter of a century, I've grown up with a keyboard and am probably too old now to ever think a touchscreen is any where near as good - but the young whippersnappers of today seem to have lightning fingers when it comes to phone texting where I thinks it's much easier to make a phone call, so they are also a lot faster than I am on a touchscreen keyboard. So I can't speak for their preferences, for me a touchscreen would be slower.
Meetings? I disagree on that one - whether you're using a laptop or a tablet, your attention on the device is no different. Plus I frequently come across scenarios where someone else is presenting on a projector, a discussion results about a topic, one member of the audience says "Here, have a look at this" then plugs his laptop into the projector to show to the room - something you can't do with a tablet directly.
Incidentally, my beef with commercial software is not that the applications themselves are binary-only, closed-source applications but that, in many cases, the file formats that they use are proprietary.
Microsoft really has no right to complain about the number of viruses that have plagued Windows in the past (I've not used Windows 7 but I'll assume it does a much better job of restricting virus spread based on what I've read about it) if they insist on constantly "having their cake and eating it".
They want to charge high prices for their market-dominating products and keep the file formats those products use as proprietary so that an Open Source application cannot use those formats properly, thus forcing people who simply will not spend $130+ on an Office package to go down the virus-ridden warez route. So they really only have themselves to blame if Windows has had a reputation for poor security.
OOO's advantages (free & portable) are of no interest to a business. A copy of MS Office for business costs between $130 [pbdistributiononline.com] and $180. This is not even in the noise - it doesn't register. This is what an hour of work of a not very highly paid engineer costs to a business.
There's no denying that MS Office is the defacto standard currently and I too doubt that OOO or LibreOffice will see any penetration in business environments whilst the majority of them remain Microsoft shops.
But not every personal user has between $130 and $180 to spend on an office application, especially if you're just firing it up once a week to open a spreadsheet for your home accounts.
And sure, in business circles, lots of people need clever macros and VB embedding inside documents that clearly a free alternative package cannot provide - but those features, and many other advanced MS Office features, aren't needed by most casual users.
I used to be the guy amongst my circle of friends and family who could get them any "dodgy" software they wanted but over the past five years or so, I've gone more and more to Linux at home anyway where I've had the chance to play with a lot more Open Source software, including OOO and now LibreOffice. I still use Windows XP but use the same OSS apps on it as on Linux, where possible, for compatibility reasons.
I also made a decision then that I was going to stay legal, if only because I was getting sick & tired of the number of viruses I was installing onto my Windows boxes with all the warez stuff I was using, and that therefore I would either use free software or buy/register any commercial software that I needed to use. I do have about a half-dozen commercial applications that I use in Windows at the moment for which OSS does not have any equivalents of equal quality. Since that time, I've not seen a single virus on any of my Windows machines.
Similarly, when friends and family came to me for dodgy software after that point in time, I'd recommend them to a piece of free software to install and, if they weren't happy with that, to go buy the commercial equivalent with the functionality they needed. Again, I've fixed far fewer of their PCs since then because they've had nowhere near as many damaging viruses as they used to have, and many of them are using OOO and are quite happy with it.
It strikes me that if everyone took the attitude of paying for the software they use or using a free equivalent, the Internet would be a lot less inundated with viruses and bots than it is today. And whilst I use Open Source more than commercial software, I consider a computer to be a productivity and entertainment tool and everyone wants to use the best tool for the job they need to do - sometimes that's freeware, sometimes that's commercial software, and that's why there's room for both to co-exist side-by-side.