Lisa Bu's J676 Blog

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Response to Group 5's Reading

In my previous life as a computer programmer, I had used lots of open source software (Apache, Tomcat, ect.) and supported the movement. But there's one big barrier that makes it hard for people including myself to use more open source software: the pain of switching from a good old commercial software to a new open source one. At the beginning of this semester, I was determined to use open source as much as possible, so installed OpenOffice, a free open source office package, instead of Microsoft Office in my new computer. Initially OpenOffice seemed very easy to use and similar to Word, even allowing exporting/importing document in Word format. But inconvenience started to emerge: I can't incorporate EndNote into it as easily; I can't use some of the shortcuts I've mastered in Word; It's a pain to write a paper in group when we had to email draft back and forth. When most other people you work with use Word, when other essential software integrates well only with Word, I find it hard to stick with OpenOffice. Under the deadline pressure, I gave in and installed Microsoft Office again.

In principle, I support open source whole-heartedly. But in reality, it's harder to do than I thought. So how can open source overcome the barrier? What can make it more adoptable?

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