Free is good....

I'm a fan of open source software. Primarily because I have a major problem with having to pay outrageous upgrade fees for minor program updates to applications. The biggest offenders in this arena are Microsoft Office and Quicken. I own licensed copies of both applications, but cringe every time I face having to pay upgrade fees. I appreciate the open source model that allows me to run an application and then contribute financially (which I do) to those applications I get use from.

While browsing around today, I read an nice short article about "Five programs you can afford in a financial meltdown." I've been a big fan of Open Office starting with version 2. The article also lists Gnucash, which intrigues me. I've been pissed at Quicken ever since they decided to abandon the universally-accepted .qif file format for financial transfers so that they could force people to switch to the .ofx file format, for which they charge. The pigs at Quicken just can't seem to drink enough client blood. Hey ya batards, you're already gouging for annual updates, isn't that enough??? Apparently not. Microsoft Money supports both .qif and .ofx formats, and doesn't charge banks (which pass on the cost) to use .ofx. I'll have to find some time to check out Gnucash and see if it would work for me.

I had a similar situation last week at work. We need to track the project my team is working on and the company has licensed installers for MS Project. But they note on the installer page that between the download and the maintenance contract, we get tagged for $600 a user!!! I need 6 people to be able to update a project timeline with actuals, and 3K is just way too much to pay for this capability. Not to mention that Project 2007 takes away the ability to save a project file in HTML. Why? So they can force you to instead purchase project server to get web-shareable project output. This kind of sick pathetic removal of existing capability just to generate additional income goads me to my core and drives the spirit of the Open Source intitiatives. So I did some searching for open source project managers, and found one that looked promising. It supported the ability to import/export files in MS Project format, so we could still interact with team members that already had their wallet cleaned by Micro$oft Project licen$e$. The problem is that I lost the link to the site I found due to a desktop tech corrupting my system beyond repair, forcing the need to re-image it (a different long story I wont delve into here).

I'll have to take a peek around today and see if I can find the web site once again....