Time passes

Yeah, it does. Coz the last time I wrote that last thing, called woot, I was a student. Sitting away, tucked in some obscure corner of the world, in a place called Calcutta, having absolutely nothing to do, and no one to think about but myself.
Now, I am sitting far away.

Really far away. Farther than the biggest stretch of my imagination.
I am in Bangkok right now. In the JW Marriott hotel. In one of their biggest conference rooms. Listening to yet another talk about something that I had spent a lot of time learning about. This is strange. Once upon a time, I spent money and time to learn all this. Now I am being paid to sit through this class, and I don't even need it. Life does come a complete circle.

Oh, I have a laptop now. But yeah, it is not mine. Not loaned, but kind of owned corporately. And this is from the corporate network. So don't really know if people will be happy with this. But then, I frankly believe that this is a better utilization of my time as opposed to trying to listen to the class today. There is nothing to listen to.

As I was telling you, I have this laptop now. And the moment I got it, I wanted to move from my desktop to this. Which essentially meant that I wanted to install all the programs I had in my old desktop onto this machine and move over all my data files to this machine.

Then I got the shock of my life. They told me that all I could use was the core-load software. Nice term that - core load. But that really put the shackles on me. I could understand it in a way. They did not want any pirated software on the computer. Made sense. Obviously corporates dont really want to have pirated stuff on their assets, coz it might turn out to be painful for them in the future. Completely understandable.

Then I wanted to install at least my open source software on it. My openoffice.org for example, so that I could at least edit my stuff in that format. The answer to my astonishment was "no". I was not allowed to load any of this software at all. All I could use was the MS products, for which I had licenses via the corporate route and nothing else.

No shareware, probably makes sense. Coz there might be license issues.

Unnecessary small testing of programs also makes sense. Coz there might be an security and malware issues.

But what does not make sense is why no OOo? Is OOo not different from a free mario clone on the web?

Dont corporates distinguish between them?

What if I had a problem with the machine and I could just use a free software off the web and set it right? Can I not do it?

How does corporate handle different kinds of software. Is it always this fearful and afraid of non MS products? Or probably something which they had not paid for?

When will open products get corporate acceptability?

Gawd only help me find those answers. Or mebbe slashdot can...

sweet lord

~!nrk