Post lots of links to malware. Shouldn't be too hard, it's Microsoft snooping.

Don't be so negative. Imagine a bright future where you can 3d-print your own Darwin Award, wouldn't that be nice?

They're probably organized in some way or another already and it's not like they compete on the software they use. Just make sure to keep the requirements low and realistic and that the result is Free or that you own the code.

I suspect it's more the failure to come with a timely and interesting successor to XP. Vista was 'too little, too late'. It also caused IE to drop market share and happened way before netbooks, tablets or smart phones became a factor.

I thought RMS was tapped as Balmy the Chairthrower's successor.

I object. Don't call atheism a type of religion.

and last month's image search.

It's a pun. Paleontology is literally scratching the surface and they also know relatively little.

Refactoring Perl for dummies.

Certainly you mean a 'nouveaub'.

I wonder what kind of dating sites you get with a catholic name, or maybe you'll get links for kindergartens straight away.

I'd say IR4 is internet. Robotics is industrial revolution + IT imho.

The next hybrid is computers + internet + physical adaptation. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have already lead to breakthroughs in the medical field and I think we'll see more remarkable developments in neurosurgery.

A forum where every post needs to be prefixed with "IANAL".

Wait, what? Online advertizing is outdated and irrelevant already? This whole online thing goes way too fast, I can't keep up.

This here is a case of an organization which wants to use open-source but finds it can't. There are a number of reasons for this, their own ineptitude and internal opposition for starters, failures in interoperability with other organizations too, but still they found they can't get rid of MS Office. It's perhaps far fledged to actually blame MS for this, it shows that it's also far fledged to accuse open-source adepts of zealotry or calling them crazy.

The "version-specific upgrade" thing helps to establish vendor lock-in. And personally, I don't believe in the "the next version of Windows will be the best" mantra anymore, I've heard it too often. For many consumers and commercial users there's hardly a reason to upgrade their office suite for functionality improvements alone (and more often reason not to upgrade). In this case they even use MS Office 2000. The workforce here has apparently been trained to work with OO.o.

But here, it seems, it doesn't exist or isn't good (they do use a number of other 'open source' software packages). This is a case of non-competition.

The case doesn't show OO.o is "an objectively inferior product", it doesn't even show whether it's "good enough" or not. It shows the city of Freiburg needs to clear up their IT mess and feels, partly by outside pressure, compelled to standardize on MS Office. It shows that the tool is more important than the product, even when that product isn't 'proprietary'. Their decision will lead to Freiburg becoming another actor to force other organizations to use MS Office, meaning even less competition. Freiburg apparently didn't consider spending some of the license savings to improve the 'open-source' office product. The inhabitants of Freiburg don't have to "leave them alone" in this decision though and I hope they don't (without resorting to zealotry).