The Benefits of Free/Open-Source Software

This paper was written for a college course called written communications. It is in APA style, a format commonly used for research papers. I earned a 99% on it, and I lost the 1% only because it was a bit long! My instructor, who isn't into computers, liked the paper and had an easy time understanding it. All technical terms are defined, and I wrote the paper with the average person in mind.

Anyway, the paper is available in three formats:

• OpenOffice.org Writer format, the native format of the office suite I used to write this paper

• Adobe Acrobat PDF, thanks to OpenOffice.org's nice direct PDF export feature! You will need xpdf, Ghostscript, Adobe Reader, or some other program to read this file, but it will look exactly the way it's supposed to on any platform, whether you have Linux or not.

• HTML, so you can read it on-line, though you will lose most of the page formatting!

Since this paper was meant for printing, the only way to see it the way it's supposed to look is to read it in the OpenOffice.org or PDF formats. However, if you just want to read it and don't care about the formatting, feel free to look at the HTML version. This paper is in APA style, which is the document style that my college requires all papers to be in.

This paper, as well as my entire website, was written entirely with OpenOffice.org, a free (in terms of both freedom and price) office suite for Linux, Macintosh, Windows, Solaris, and BSD systems. This office suite is Microsoft's biggest challenge to Microsoft Office because OpenOffice.org can read and write in Microsoft's formats without much, if any, loss in formatting! In addition, I use a free operating system, Debian GNU/Linux, so no proprietary software was used in the making of this paper.

This paper is copyright ©2004 by Daniel Brodzik. Verbatim copying and distribution is permitted provided the copyright notice present in the paper itself is preserved.