Until now I’ve tolerated Microsoft’s greed, but the final straw for me was the recent lawsuit against Barnes & Noble for violating patents related to things like a “loading status icon” or “loading images in the background”.

http://www.ecollegepc.com/

Also, there may be great free software that is the alternative to some windows software, but there are certain things you cannot do on Linux without a vm. This includes newer videogames and some hardware as well as programs that are just vastly superior to anything made for linux regardless of the price (photoshop).

Again you can run just about anything on any computer nowadays with vms but its just a whole lot simpler to use windows.

Not agree on what you say about Ubuntu as a standards violating distro. What open standards do they violate? The architecture of Debian, is not a standard, it’s just the choice of Debian. The license permits other distro’s to do with it whatever they please, as long as they respect the license and I can’t se any reason why they would fork anyting..

- Every single version of Microsoft Office has been backwards compatible. In fact, Older versions of Office had an update to read newer version’s docs (docx, xlsx, pptx, etc…)

- I would hate to be Dutch, because the US (where my computer resides), it is officially recognized under law that buying a computer with preloaded software does not constitue consent of the license agreement. The law allows you to decide to uninstall (or install a new OS) without accepting the agreement, and now you can even request reimbursement for the cost of the license.

- I enjoyed reading your paragraph about standards, and then hearing you talk about how great Ubuntu is. Ubuntu is one of the biggest standards-violating distros on the Linux map. I completely defeats the intent of the Debian architecture design and everything it stands for. There is a reason Debian wanted to completely fork the baseline to prevent Ubuntu from tainting it.

- The “Phone Home” concept is not unique to Windows. As far as OS’s go, Windows and OSX are the big culprits, but I try this: Run your free Ubuntu, load up your free Firefox, and type something into your free Google, and viola! You have just sent more personal information about yourself than Microsoft could every collect via WGA.

Other than that, I totally agree with you. People should give Linux a shot. If you don’t play overly new games (like the gamer camping out to buy the game the night is comes out), or you don’t require certain Windows-only productivity software (sorry – I love openOffice but impress just can’t render ppt files all the time), then there is no reason to go free.

@Brian: You obviously did not notice that this article is from 2007. Glad to see things are improving technically, but I still think most of the objections are valid today. As for writing more; I usually write in dutch..

Vista’s User Access Control system is a very elegant way to introduce the concept of sudo to users. You can open and edit documents made in Office 2010 even if you are using Office XP. The only reason anyone should feel forced to use MS Office is if they want to be able to share documents effectively with other organizations who also use it.

You’ve written a very opinionated article and I guarantee people will take you and the FOSS movement less seriously because of your tone. I look forward to reading another article of yours that doesn’t stoop to lies to make your point.