This development earlier this month took opensource enthusiasts globally and locally by surprise. This is because Microsoft has not been seeing eye-to-eye(like Microsoft’s fierce opposition to supporting the OpenDocument format) with the opensource community specifically the Linux folks for decades, though there have been discrete accounts where Microsoft showed some love for the Linux camp.
Ordinarily, it’s not been possible to install windows software on Linux based Operating systems, however, there’s been a workaround of running Microsoft Office on Linux using “Crossover Office” by CodeWeavers or using the popular Windows emulator called Wine. So Linux users have been using Openoffice and more recently Libreoffice(yes there’s lots of politics in opensource too) as alternative office productivity suits.
So when when Jake Markhus posted the story on Linux User group emailing list which am put of, Stephen S Musoke, a re-known software developer who currently works as a Program Coordinator at Mercy Corps had this to say;
Personally am a full time linux user who does lots of document creation given my kind of work.Personally speaking, I don’t use MS word and rarely do i use Libreoffice on my Opensuse laptop! In response to Stephen, I think;
Its just about the Office money … not Linux love. Remember since Hyper-V support is built into the Linux Kernel (with Microsoft support) plus Mono for .NET this may be easier than a complete rewrite.
And to sum up the arguments, Paul Bagyenda says;
Now speaking native apps, already Android already has enough good-enough document processors. MS Word only has a strong brand that will be strong enough to entice android users to download it.
So to answer the question — will it matter? I think it depends; for me, it won’t matter as i’ve been using alternative browser-based editors to do word processing and creation. For the enterprise, as Paul has well stated, Microsoft has a strong footprint in there with its ecosystem of enterprise software solution(which work flawlessly), it won’t really matter to them as long as their current setup(which is Office on Windows) solves their current problems.
