I almost feel obligated to pirate Office for Mac

I thought the post was pretty clear on a few points: I won't pirate it, because I'm a programmer myself and just goes against what I believe; I actively wanted to pay for it; I want them to make it easy for me to do so.

Yes I'm frustrated, but no, I won't go against what I believe just to get what I want and I actively want to give them the money they ask for. I want that situation to be simple and straightforward for me to resolve and for them to claim their revenue. That should be quite clear, and it also should have nothing to do with who I work for.

That said, since you brought IMG up and how we are at supporting open source drivers, that's something that's overwhelmingly down to our customers and what they want to do. When a customer or partner does want us to open code up, we work with them to make it happen as much as we can.

I think you're more frustrated at Intel than us. You could argue that we should provide an open driver in parallel to our customers, but that wouldn't help you much because of how the drivers have to glue to the rest of the software running and the SoC's systems architecture. So you'd also need support from our customers, so we just punt to them.

We could do better, but I don't think we necessarily do badly there.

Check out his recent talk at the London Graphics Hackerspace: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWzcEKHbBv4

Since when is a hardware company obligated to give support to open source drivers??? Really? Really.

1. A hardware company can choose to sell its products to whatever class of customers it likes. It doesn't have to cater to a particular subset of philosophical adherents, when marketing a product. It might not be realistic to ask a person to pay money for a product, when they can only marshal so many hands from a finite set of costly human resources, to meet the demands of a certain type of customer.

2. It makes sense for a small hardware company to cater to users of for-profit proprietary operating systems, mostly because there's hard incentive for makers of proprietary libraries to support their software in kind (ie: you can enforce an annual contract against Microsoft, but GNU?). This is the exact business model that Microsoft has preyed upon and grown fat off of for years.

3. The open source community has a reputation for taking on all comers. This is to say that when the going gets tough, and there's real demand for something awesome, the open source community will step up and brute force a project into submission. We have a reputation for pulling our own weight when it counts.

I don't think it's correct to frown upon a hardware company because it doesn't cater to open source philosophies. It's not always easy to turn that kind of pie-in-the-sky demand into something that pays the very real bills.

I think it's correct to frown upon a company that espouses vehement animosity towards a hacker community that it could wisely cultivate as a neutral ally, that neither helps nor harms profits. Companies that actively spearhead campaigns of criminal prosecution and litigation against hobbyists that mean no harm (and often increase demand, or frequently support their own demand) ...that kind of behavior is toxic.

In other words:

if people buy your goods, they should feel free to use them as the please, and if they figure out new unintended uses for those goods, great! But that doesn't obligate the maker to now support an unexpected, unplanned emergent behavior, however popular it may be.

Shouldn't it be more a case of "ask and be grateful if you get it" rather than "ask and throw a fit when you don't"?

You get burned once and then you move on.

Can't speak for OP but for many people, yes, it is. My sister works in arts admin. Dealings with funders are done using Word files with macros and protected areas. Works ok on Mac Word (they use Apple at work) but not with Open/LibreOffice.

When I set up an old thinkpad for my sister to use at home, I suggested Ubuntu and got an earful. So an OEM copy of Windows 7 and she got a licensed Office 2010 under her employer's licence agreement.

Also William Gibson...

"Word is, I'm told, horrid, but it talks to publishers, which is really all I use it for."

http://william.gibson.usesthis.com/

I really hope the UK government can stick to this...

https://blogs.fsfe.org/gerloff/2012/11/01/the-uks-new-open-s...

(It was posted to HN some days ago)

But yeah, at my last two jobs we've exclusively used Google Docs, and it's been a dream. No more hunting your inbox for a (probably outdated) copy of the Office doc. Sharing is a dream.

It's not quite as usable as a native app. I would be rather happy if there were a native client to GDocs, but as it stands, the ability to collaborate, share, and disseminate far, far trumps whatever usability gaps between it and Office.

(didn't try clicking the email link, I'm gonna probably order the box online)

Why exactly I need Office? Word. For publishing. OO or other will mess the styles, formatting, etc.

Apparently the publishing tool doesn't accept other formats.

LibreOffice works just find for my word-processing needs.

Edit: Forgot about Gnumeric for a moment. It's probably twice as good as LibreOffice for what I need, but doesn't do 100% of what Excel does.

I still keep a print-out of a requirements document on my desk that our windows-running QA person printed for me, because there is nothing else in our office that'll display it properly. Office for Mac, Google Docs, LibreOffice, etc - all display revision garbage mixed in with content, outdated text, etc.

I could ask the client to re-send the document without tracking information, or converted to a PDF, but due to their various chain o' command issues, it would probably take a week.

So yes, Office is still necessary, at least in our case.

I had to edit a presentation urgently. It was nothing exotic, made with PowerPoint. LibreOffice failed to open half the images, as did Keynote (which I bought just for this purpose, because it was an emergency). I can't tell you what happened, just that the one time I needed LibreOffice (or similar) to work, it didn't.

As for Office generally, I still haven't found a good substitute for Excel (sadly).

So the only reason I've ever had in the past few years to use Office is that other people still use it, and Google Docs and LibreOffice are not perfectly compatible 100% of the time.

Also, the only time I really focus on non-code for hours at a time is when I am flying and thats when its nice to be able to work on a) production descriptions b) sales decks and c) job posts or other docs, all of which are better in the Office application.

When I asked the vendor, I was told I could pay another $10,000 so I could buy a new version of the software that just so happened to have a newer DRM dongle.

At that point you really have four options:

1.) Hope someone else pirated it. 2.) Kill a few evenings cracking the application with IDA Pro. 3.) Forever remain on Windows XP on a graphics workstation, unable to use the entirety of RAM installed, or some horrible dual-boot situation isolating you from the rest of your tools. 4.) Pay ANOTHER $10,000.

Seriously, you have no position to tell anyone that there's 'no justification'. It's obvious you're missing real world experience here. I picked #2, myself, but I'd have rather saved time and picked #1 if it had already been done.

Another option that I found is that software is somehow worse in the place where I live. A good example is games with awful polish dubbing or an invasive DRM. I actually ended up few times buying a game, just not to use it and download a pirated version anyway.

What sucks is when you make your resume in latex and you apply to a company that only takes word or raw text files. I've actually skipped out on companies because of this.

Is that a serious suggestion...?!