On Fri, 27 Aug 2010, Adam Morris wrote: > On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 11:37:12AM -0500, Mike Miller wrote: > >> On Thu, 26 Aug 2010, Loren Cahlander wrote: >> >>> On Aug 26, 2010, at 10:14 AM, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: >>> >>>> I write doco using Vim and Docbook (when it's not wiki'ed, which is >>>> the usual route these days); tho if I knew more about XML or other >>>> formatting tools I might go a different route. >>> >>> I highly recommend oXygenXML ( http://oxygenxml.com ) for editing >>> DocBook and all XML and XQuery. It runs on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and MS >>> Windows. >> >> You had me interested for a minute, but then I realized that it is not >> free software. I can't do that anymore. I've had too many problems >> with lock-in. It's not about the money. > > Could I ask what problems you've had if its not about the money? I can > understand not wanting to use free software (as in libre), but it sounds > to me like you've had some other issues over the years. The basic problem is that you dedicate yourself to learning the software and then you become dependent. This has happened to me, definitely. Consider WordPerfect 5.1 -- where is that? What good are my skills now? When I was in grad school about 15-20 years ago I spent a lot of time on that and now I can't use it. With free software I'd have the code and I would hire someone to make it work if it was no longer supported and I really wanted it. Related to that problem, once I have skills with some program, then I become an advocate for it. I don't want to work for the sales or marketing division of a software company. I especially don't want to push students to use a program that's going to cost them an arm and a leg after they graduate. An example of this is SAS. We used it a lot and taught students how to use it. We never paid much for it. One day I wanted to put SAS on a new Linux box and I expected the usual site-license pricing but SAS Corp said no -- we could have the usual university discount, but the site license was for other UNIX OSs, not for Linux. Now I found out that SAS with university discount costs $3,800/year and for a student who graduates and wants his company to buy it or wants to buy it himself for consulting work, it would cost five times as much: $19,000/year. That made my blood boil. I stopped using SAS and now I use GNU R. GNU R is (A) better than SAS in most ways, (B) it is the top choice of serious academic statisticians and (C) it is free software, both in dollars and in terms of restrictions on the user. Another really important observation is that free software has grown extremely fast in only a few years. I see Linux as a better choice than Windows and the other UNIXes at any price, GNU R as better than all other stat packages at any price, and most or all of the free options as good enough to be preferred to their sometimes slightly superior (right now) non-free competitors. I only use non-free when forced to do so by an employer, when some hardware requires it or when it's part of a service like Google services. Mike