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Re: [LUG] Excel mangles genes draft letter



On Wednesday 21 July 2004 08:33, Carl wrote:

With any worthwhile
spreadsheet you should format the cells and create the functions before
you drop your live data into it. Any other method of operation is asking
for trouble to slap you in the face. 

?Prior art?
Should a spreadsheet with intellisense and enhanced ease of use and so on 
include an assistant/wizard to tell you that when it sees it may be 
happening?
"You seem to be trying to analyse complex data by opening it in a new 
spreadsheet.  Would you like to format the cells first?"
?Prior art?


I've always believed this to be a fallacy perpetuated by the "Free"
software" advocates. Are we talking about "free" in the intellectual
sense or the financial? 
I think we were talking about the _incremental cost_ of a further copy of an 
application going into use, and the incremental cost of development of 
another feature, to the end-user summed over society.


The only reason major corporations and Governments want
to move over to Linux is because their accountants believe they can make
financial savings.

No.
1.  Security
2.  Economic strategic interests
3.  Apparent conformance with treaty obligations
4.  Freedom from coercion into a model "owned" by a competitor, where that 
competitor has the advantage of prior position.

there may be more

and yes, some governments have views on capitalism and hence on competition if 
only in bidding for contracts.

The only reason the person in the street wants "free"
software is because they don't want to pay for it 
I do have the wireless end of my network up now, so I could stand outside and 
answer that, but when I'm in the street I continue to want more than that.

The most successful open source/free operations have been Open Office
and Redhat/fedora. In both cases Sun and Redhat did what they did in
order to take advantage of free development. 

I'll comment on Sun.  Although Sun Tzu didn't have the chance to comment on it 
in his book[1], if he had he would have described it easily.
SUN purchased and released Star Division's office suite as a direct attack in 
the corporate economic skirmishing they were doing with Microsoft.
MS derived most of its income from the windows OS/environment and from their 
office suite, and thus reducing the total value of the office suite market 
reduced SUN's opponent's income.  The effect was greater than any that it had 
on SUN.  A while later, we see that MS has paid SUN a very large amount of 
money to settle certain other disputes.  This followed the release of SUN's 
user desktop, and of a model that would plausibly support companies who chose 
that...

They let us do the work for
nothing - instead of paying a programming and development team, and
ensure that the licence agreement allows them to reap the rewards of our
I don't have statistics on the affiliation of the developers working on OOo, 
or the financial input that SUN has chosen to make.  It may be less clear 
than that suggests.

[1] The Art of War.

-- 
Adrian Midgley                   Open Source software is better
GP, Exeter                       http://www.defoam.net/


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