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Alternatives
Despite the attractiveness of FOSS as an alternative to proprietary software, there
are some shortcomings. There are certain applications that currently do not have an open
source equivalent. One of many examples is the elementary school program called
Accelerated Reader which is widely used, but there is yet no free equivalent (Hill &
Gaughan, 2006, p. 58). I discovered rather earlier on that some of the documents and
files I can created in the past were not accessible to my while running Ubuntu. This
resulted in lost time and productivity on my part, because some of those documents had
to be recreated. Events similar to this had me questioning whether FOSS could really be
an alternative to those individuals already using other platforms, or would it be better
suited for new users who had little to lose.
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Sitting at my after school during interaction I thought it would be a good
idea to update some posters and flyers for technology courses next year. Most of
the work had already been done previously using Microsoft Publisher and the
24inch plotter and color printers in my classrooms. After plugging in my external
Western Digital Passport hard drive into my laptop I navigated to the drive and
began digging through the folders. I’m usually pretty organized with files, but
constantly creating and saving files on various machines over the years makes my
searching take longer than I’d like. I manage to find a JPG image of an
Engineering Technology poster, but wasn’t able to find my brochures by
navigating through the folders. So I decided to try the file search feature under
Ubuntu and through in some keywords into the search box like technology, .pub,
brochure, and soon enough several results popped onto the screen. The two files
Computer Technology Broshure.pub and Engineering Technology Broshure.pub
were in the returned results and I attempted to open them by double clicking; I
realized that I didn’t have Publisher on the computer, but I thought that possibly
Open Office would have the appropriate program or conversion.
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