Hmmm, Microsoft changing their Licensing 6 price points to counter Linux. Well let’s see; we have an agreement with Microsoft at work and we pay almost $400 for Office 2000 Professional and $150 for a license for Windows XP (which we won’t touch; we install Windows 2000 which is an option at this point). Sounds like it is about $475 more per PC than Linux and StarOffice. Of course, Microsoft will tell you that it is bad to switch to Linux. The question remains, though, why are they dropping prices by 33-107%? Makes one wonder.
I know of a small business in the area that was a Microsoft shop until they changed to Licensing 6; at that point they made a clean switch to Linux - server and workstations. After a bit of initial training issues, they have not suffered at all with the change and in fact have saved money in the process. They purchase PCs without an operating system and have their tech install Linux.
Granted, this is a small system, but it would work in larger networks as well. I’m not convinced that Microsoft is the way to go in the future. I demonstrate this with my home PC. There are three pieces of Microsoft software that I use. They are:

1. Windows 2000; I don’t use Linux at this point because it won’t recognize my scanner, my wireless mouse scroll wheel and my print sharing device.
2. Microsoft GIF Animator; I use this only to set the transparency color on a GIF for web use.
3. Microsoft Internet Explorer; I have to keep this up to date because of two other pieces of software:
   • Grisoft’s AVG Antivirus - it uses IE for the update process
   • MAX’s HTML Beauty - it uses IE for the preview of the web page coding that I do

To browse the internet, I use Mozilla. I just downloaded and installed the latest version, 1.2. No popups, blocking ad banners within the page, secure browsing. Also includes email, newsgroups browsing, IRC and composer. I have also installed the Calendar add-in.
I use OpenOffice for my office suite. It can read and write to MS Office apps of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I haven’t had any problems working with documents and sending them to work and back. Overall a great product.
Oh, so you want to chat and all your friends have AOL-MSN-Yahoo? I use Trillian. It talks with all three as well as IRC and ICQ. I chat on AOL and MSN as my kids each use one but not the other.
My point in all this is NOT to be an advertisement. It is that we don’t need to be dependent upon Microsoft and their monopoly. A lot of people don’t like the fact that Microsoft won their court case and have been decreed to NOT be a monopoly. They aren’t doing anything about it, though. There are literally hundreds of alternatives to Microsoft software. All we need to do is use it; that is the only way Microsoft will stand up and take notice - when the money stops flowing.