I have always wondered if it would be possible to use Open source software in an office that heavily uses MS products and not be detected. The experiment: To replace as much of my personal desktop applications that I use on day to day basis with those that are Open Source and/or shareware.

Currently I am on assignment with a company that has a large customer base and a busy call and support center. I am doing their development, reporting and some of their IT support. From the start I had implemented Firefox, svn, and WAMP to support SVN. I had used these products and their budget was such that it wouldn’t support alot more than the bare essentials. My day to day existence was normal, but it was all contained to me and my personal development. There wasn’t any outside interaction. Fastward to last week.

In a slow day before Thanksgiving, my mind wandered back to my experiment. Could I function with opensource/shareware products and how many such products before it became noticeable. Last week I took the initiative, I installed Mozilla’s Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and gVim. I carefully configured Thunderbird to mimic outgoing mail as closely as I could to Outlook. There were some difference’s, but only one person commented on it. This week I am going to install and configure Bugzilla to track changes and requests and produce reports for management.

Things have gone well. Spreadsheets, reports, documents, Email are all going according to plan. The only complaint I have is I miss the folder view in Outlook 2002, but then this office is still on Office 2000 so it is not missed by the definition of the experiment.

I am a huge fan of Robert Scoble’s. Through his work I came to realize that MS has a lot of cool and interesting research going on. With products like voice and face recognition; picture stitching and their research into UI. Their are a lot of highly talented people working their. Their jobs aren’t easy, especially given the size of the company and how compartmentalized something as big as MS can be, sometimes even out of necessity.

The whole concept of a humanized MS was a very hard sell to me, given their history of DOS, dblspace, Office, etc. I was willing to at least see what the “other side” was about. Then came Steve Balmer’s announcements and rants about Linux and the “patented infringements of linux.” How he hinted about every linux user would have to pay royalties. Now, on the coat tails of their announcement of this patent infringement and their deal with Novell, comes word that Novell is going to fork OpenOffice and add Open XML to it.

GrokLaw has a good description and on going discussion about it. This really just comes back to MS’s predatory practices: copy and/or buy out the competition. When it comes to their core products their isn’t a lot of ingenuity, just copying, buying and reselling it. Once that is accomplished make the world believe they came up with the idea and redesign it to just enough to force others to license it. Brilliant in an evil sort of way, force the world to accept your mediocrity and kill of competitive and innovative thinking.