In May of 2007 I wrote a post called Open Source and Microsoft Free. Little did I know that this post would show up on Digg, Slashdot, Craigslist, and several other popular web sites and become a platform for both the Linux and Microsoft camps to wage yet another flame war.
This whole "Microsoft free" experiment started when a colleague of mine challenged me to eat my own dog food after reading many of my posts about my dabbling with open source technologies. The next day, after a few blue screens of death and various issues with Outlook, I grabbed a Ubuntu CD and installed it on my laptop....at work! From that day forward, I have not used a single Microsoft product at work. It has been one year now and I have survived with Thunderbird and Evolution, Open Office, Firefox, and many other open source replacements for Microsoft products.
I put "Microsoft free" in quotes because there are a few exceptions. First, I did install IE 6.0 under wine for that rare occasion that I stumble across a website that only works on IE. Second, there is no answer for Visio. Most of the Visio diagrams that I needed to read were embedded in design documents in Word which I can read with Open Office Writer. But for those that I needed Visio for, I opened them at home on my XP box (I have 1 XP, 1 Vista, and 5 Linux boxes at home). I also used Visio at home when I had to create Visio diagrams. The issue is Visio's proprietary format is not available for developers to write a translation utility for.
With those two issues aside, which represents about 1% of my overall usage on my laptop, my Open Source experience was nearly flawless. Open Office worked remarkably well both receiving Microsoft Office files and creating files in Office format. I exchanged literally thousands of documents between Microsoft Office and Open Office. I never encountered a single issue with Word and Excel and occasionally encountered minor formatting issues with Power Point files. The formatting issues where nothing more then some minor placement issues which probably occurred less then 5% of the time.
Over the course of the year I experimented with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Freespire, Mepis, and PCLinuxOS. I settled on Kubuntu and recently upgraded with ease to the latest version, Hardy Heron. Here is my analysis of the different Linux distros from last fall. With this "Microsoft free" laptop I have coexisted with 1000+ employees who use XP and various verions of Office including 2007 (the 2007 compatibility add-on works fine). I also delivered presentations at conferences using Open Office Impress and traveled across the country and internationally with no issues with wireless connectivity.
I am not in any camps. I use XP and Linux at home and like both. I gave Outlook the boot years ago at home and do just fine with Thunderbird. It has every feature I need. I do however have problems with Vista. But my message here is not about recommending what tools that my readers should use. My message is that I performed at a high level at work while using Linux, Open Office, and other open source products. These tools did not hinder my ability to do my job and did not impact anyone else at my job. I was able to productively coexist with no Microsoft tools in a Microsoft shop. That is all I am trying to say.
I am not going to recommend to anybody that they change their company standards away from Microsoft. What I will tell you is that open source is a viable alternative that can be used in a production environment. So when you see flame wars where the two camps argue back and forth about their favorite technology, you can point to this post when people claim that Linux and Open Office just won't work in the work place. I have validated that they do work for over 365 days now. Whether we should use these tools at work is a whole different story that really depends on factors like corporate culture, skill sets, budgets, user base, executive support, and many others.
All I can say is that for the last year, I have been using Open Source exclusively and I am loving it!
After writing an article that discussed embracing open source, one of my colleagues entered my office and gave me the "Eat your own Dog Food" speech. So he downloaded Ubuntu Desktop
for me using BitTorrent and burned me a CD. The install was simple and I was up an running in minutes. I have been running without one piece of Microsoft software on my laptop for three weeks now and I am loving it. Free at last, Free at last!
There are some challenges though. Open Office is a great replacement for Microsoft Office but I can't find a replacement to read existing Visio diagrams. Today I received an MS Project file that I couldn't open. I am sure if I search the net I can find an open source tool to do the job. I also had a problem with my printer driver which took some time to resolve. Thunderbird is a great email client but it doesn't have hooks into my Outlook Calendar so I can't use it for my corporate mail. I am using Evolution which is only marginal. When time allows I will test out Sunbird and Lightning.
But with all of that aside, I no longer wait for 5-10 minutes for my laptop to boot up. I don't wait forever for Outlook to come up in the mornings, and I don't get any system crashes. The blue screen of death is a distant memory and the daily reboot routine is no longer required. There are no stupid paper clips popping up asking me if I am sure that I know what I am doing.
I am sure my freedom will end when somebody in desktop services realizes that all of their Big Brother software is not being run on my laptop. I will enjoy the ride while it lasts.
I know the majority of the corporate world isn't quite ready to replace their Windows desktops with Linux yet, but I can tell you from my experience that Ubuntu is ready for prime time.
