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Originally Posted by Ali Starbright  I mean, it's okay if people get paid for their work. |
Who said that Open Source developer cannot get paid? F/OSS is about opening up the source code and licenses to make sure the source code stays open for any hackers/developers to tinker, and is NOT about being $0 cost.
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OpenOffice.org is a viable alternative - which will install on Windows. But usually I end up returning to Word for some reason or other.
Linux is simply a no no for an average user. You might be lucky and find that everything works out of the box - but likely you will have printers and things that are un-intuitive (at best).
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I agree that Linux desktop is still not as intuitive as Mac OS X or Windows 7 -- and I have been a Linux user for > 15 years. However one often misunderstood fact is, the primary user of "open source" is not your average user, but software developers who want better control of their product.
Take this website for example. vBulletin is a proprietary product -- you might be able to see the source, but its license forbids you from making modifications and distributing the core. However, vBulletin is developed on top of PHP, an open source framework/programming language, runs on Apache and MySQL, on top of Linux. In other words, open source actually helps the developer of vBulletin, Jelsoft, in building its business, as it has done so for many other business. We are all using it everyday without realising it (Firefox to access Twitter which builds on top of Scala and Cassandra and many other examples).