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A patent grants an exclusive right to an idea or algorithm for a period of up to 20 years, which means forever in the software industry. Patents prohibit others from applying knowledge. Anything that prevents people from using ideas to create new products effectively destroys innovation.

Software patents are little more than legal guns that the holder can use to shoot at you or your customers unless you pay them protection money (royalties). If you refuse to pay the protection money (oops…sorry…the royalties), the patent holder can keep you from operating in the market they want to control.

Since there are no laws concerning how patents rights can be used, the owner can ban some companies and use the patent to extort money from other companies. A single patent can put an entire software company out of business, overnight. It can happen to anyone.

The problem is that people can patent ideas instead of just products and devices. The fact that you thought of something but never did anything about it should not allow you to stop someone else who had the same idea from creating a product simply or demand royalties because he patented the idea.

Software, by its very nature is a written expression of mathematical ideas and is covered by copyright laws. The copyright prevents others from using your code to build their product but does not stop them from writing their own code to do the same thing.

Open source software cannot be patented and the “copyleft”, as it is called, license allows the purchaser to modify and improve upon or customize the code. Software patents are bad for the industry. Copyrights provide sufficient protection to software companies and have an added benefit. You must have a working program to publish it and obtain a copyright. See why I prefer Open source!!?

As a open source house, we have sat in meetings with propreitary software vendors and have dealt with proprietary vendors who described open source as “insecure”, “unsupported” “freeware”.  I doubt if they are ignorant but if they accepted open source as genuine they need to justify their pricing, I suppose.

If anyone believes what the proprietary vendors say all they need to know is that all of Google runs on open source software and all the ATMs in the banks run on Linux (it is one of the open source operating systems).

Many government agencies and educational institutions have been using open source apps on Linux for a while now (there is no license fee). Now the mainstream companies started using them as well. Generally, we come across a windows environment with a few Linux servers. To support Linux, we need people with different skillset. Perhaps these people can help with your Linux servers and apps.

I was a MS-DOS child (that was pre-Windows era!). I loved the DOS commands and used WordPerfect (with two 5.25 floppy disks and no HDD).

It was hard to move to MS Word since I needed to learn a few new things with Word. I read that it took a while for MS Excel to replace Lotus123 because people needed to unlearn the commands and learn new habits with Excel. Anyway, my point is whenever you want to replace a software it takes a little bit of effort. But I think you should try Open Office.

Open Office is an excellent alternative to the application we are so dependant on, every day! It is free – no license fee. Has similar features and similar look and feel. You can save the docs as MS Office docs or PDF. Since you have the source code, you can integrate with other applications that you choose.

If you introduce Open office in your organisation, there will definitely be some resistance. Make sure you plan well for this change. I remember, when we rolled out this application for Wonderland (when it was the only theme park in Sydney), there was resistance among the staff and the CEO handled it well. Mind you, the application was buggy then. The Open Office suite is quite advanced and worth a look.

I use it and love it.