So, allow me to present a scenario: You are helping to organize a
conference on Open Source. You receive emails about it daily, and some
of them have attachments. Some of these attachments are internal to
the organizers, and some are from external sources. Many of them, from both
sources, are
in MS Word doc format. Understandably, you are disheartened; not just
because doc files are a hassle to open, but also because the people
who are sending doc files are most likely running a non-free OS, using a non-
free word processor, and are generally just not exhibiting the qualities of
people who should be organizing an Open Source conference, or submitting
presentation proposals to an Open Source conference.
Really, you feel like these people either don’t care about the open source ideal, or are ignorant to it. If they are simply ignorant, then why are they involved, and why haven’t they taken the time to educate themselves?
Just so this post isn’t all rant, here are some options for the operating system impaired:
Plain text – Heaven forbid you transfer two paragraphs of (otherwise) unstructured text in a non-binary format.
PDF – PDFCreator is Free; you don’t even have to pirate adobe applications to make PDFs from within the cozy, womb-like confines of your MS Word install.
Oh yeah, and I won a free pop and donut today.