[OT] Free Office suite for Linux and Windows

[Richmond]

On 10/12/13 19:08, Philip Hudson wrote:
> On 10 December 2013 16:03, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> socialism pretends to despise individuals, but on a more macro level.
>>
> Individualism (or rather solipsism), perhaps, not individuals. Ask for your
> money back from your political science prof. You didn't receive a privately
> funded education that you paid for entirely yourself? That's because you
> despise individuals then.

I did not attend any political science lectures.

The main reason for this is that when I had the chance, in 1983, the 
Coal Miners
were on strike round Durham, and I was busy fighting the fact that the 
University
had a closed shop so all students had to belong to the National Union of 
Students,
and money my parents had earned and paid for my education was being 
siphoned off to
pay for scum such as Mick McGahey and Arthur Scargill. All the political 
science
lecturers were supporting these people, either because they were 
socialists who thought
it a fine thing to finance political parasites, or because they were 
being intimidated by the striking miners
wandering round Durham with wooden staves in their hands.

What I did do was move to a supposedly ex-Commie country in 1990 and found
out that as well as all the propaganda crap about people being equal and 
so forth, that,
like all totalitarian states (whatever their colour) it didn't give "a 
monkey's" for
individuals.

Now, I work for my pay and get paid for my work. No work; no pay.

While under Communism those with the 'right' sort of connexions sat 
around on their
comfy bottoms do nothing at all and getting a lot more in terms of 
material gain than
the poor folk actually doing any sort of work.

If I am anything, politically, I would describe myself as a meritocratist.

I have never heard about a political system that does not have an 
interest in money; Oh, except
George Orwell's "1984", and I don't see anyone exactly rushing to 
embrace a world like that.

>
> Open Source is not ant-capitalistic
> Hahahaha. No it is not. Not in any way, sense, manner or means. Its
> founders, "libertarians" (in the hijacked American sense, meaning
> narcissistic white male McCarthyite gun nuts) to a man, were quite clear
> about that.

Funnily enough, one of my heros (is it still acceptable to have heros?) 
was a white male gun nut;
Charlton Heston: the reason I think of him as one of my heros is 3-fold:

1. Was the first white male to march with Martin Luther King.

2. President of the American Cult Awareness Network until it got 
suborned by the scientologists.

3. That line at the end of 'Planet of the Apes' . . . this reason, of 
course, being the most important.

I am white and male, but most definitely not a gun nut. My best friend 
is black, male and
spends an awful lot of his time shooting wild boar (in India and 
Australia). My best friend is
just about as right-wing as Genghis Khan.

"Libertarian" is a word that doesn't really seem to have much substance 
if it is examined closely.

What is does seem to mean to people who call themselves libertarian is 
"I can do what I want and sucks to you"; not a terribly useful or 
constructive way of looking at the world.

>
> GNU/Linux is free software, not Open Source software.

Anybody who tries to tell me that Open Source software is 
anti-capitalistic will have me pointing directly at
Runtime Revolution: crafty capitalistic types to a man (err, sorry 
Heather and Co):

1. They launched their Open Source Initiative via Kickstarter, so they 
collected quite a lot of money
to spend on the OSS version of Livecode rather than direct profits from 
their closed version towards it.

1.1. I sent the Kickstarter thing some money, not out of "pure, 
unadulterated love", but hoping
I would get something to my benefit from it: and I did; as a result I 
was able to teach a course to kids in the summer that allowed me to 
recoup, almost exactly, my investment in the OSS version of Livecode.

This is where I pause to listen for a slightly tenuous cheer from all of 
you out "there" . . . :)

2. They were entirely up-front about their motivation: to encourage 
types like you and me to fiddle
around with the code and improve it so they could plough it back into 
the closed version.

And I take my hat off to them; so far they seem to have made a good job 
of things.

>

Now, I started this posting merely as a way of pointing out that the 
Softmaker Office people were offering a free Office suite that didn't 
slurp down the RAM like an alcoholic on a Saturday night binge.

Why, any time anybody uses the word 'Free' in computer circles all sorts 
of people need to jump on
it and say "it's not Free" (meaning "it's not 'Free' qua R. Stallman's 
definition of 'Free'") I do not know.

The office suite offered by Softmaker is now running on all my crappy 
old Pentiums in my school at about 4 times the speed LibreOffice was; 
and whatever 'Free' means; it didn't cost me anything more than letting
those awful capitalistic pigs (Softmaker Office) get their filthy mitts 
on my e-mail address (which they already had, otherwise they would have 
been unable to alert me to their very kind offer) and the 12 minutes of 
Internet time it cost me to download the DEB file.

Good enough for me.

Richmond.