Open Source Wallace

Many of you reading this are using the open source Firefox web browser and are exploring the internet like young teenage lovers full of excitement and youthful vigour. However some of you are still sat in the back of old Uncle Bill's Ford Mondeo using his gas guzzling and decrepit 'Explorer'. To you I say- break free - feel the wind in your hair and shake off the shackles of the corporate stranglehold - it's so easy, will save you cash and guarantee you are down with the kids.

Up until we came back from travelling I had been running a copy of MS Office a friend had given me, but thanks to the joy that is the Vista OS and it's constant patches (perhaps a leaking ship analogy would have been better), it now won't work. I had 3 choices: buy a new Vista friendly version, download an illegal copy with potential viruses, trojans and other nasties or the third and easiest choice: download a copy of OpenOffice - yet another Open Source package that does everything that MS Office does but it's free. Not only that but because it is open source it's constantly being updated and made better - just like Firefox and VLC (definitely the best media player out there).

Anyway this is probably a bit boring for some of you - but for me open source is exciting - it gives people the opportunity to share, work together and move the cyber world away from the Mondeo driving nonsense of the past.