University of Iowa Software

The University of Iowa, as a large research University in the heart of Iowa, has around 20,000 students. With that many students, and the professors, staff, and faculty that come along with them, one can be certain that the University of Iowa uses a lot of software. Unfortunately, much of this software is proprietary, commercial software that costs simply too much. Fortunately for many uses, open source software can be found as a replacement.

Microsoft Office is usually the chief among such software, which is offered as part of an educational license to the University students. Although it costs less than $20 for any student to buy a copy after signing an educational agreement, there are still huge costs involved. The University likely pays for a site license for usage across campus on and for on campus computers, in edition to locking students and university students to a proprietary software system.

Fortunately, the alternative, OpenOffice.org is an excellent office suite, with all the features and pieces of Microsoft Office. But, instead of having negatives, OpenOffice.org is licensed under the GPL, which means it will always be free unconditionally. In addition, it supports opening most of the latest Microsoft Office formats, including .docx, making compatibility a breeze.

In addition, OpenOffice makes use of the free and open format standard known as Open Document Format, the only truly open and free document format. A competing standard from Microsoft is hyped as open by them, but in reality it stifles openness and shared documents, locking people still to Microsoft's products. It implements every bug and bad feature from previous office version, along with several incomplete parts, although the document takes up 6000 pages, making it impossible for anyone else to implement while locking users of the format into Microsoft Word.