Re:The first one is free... (Score 1)

Use OSS tools. They're free, cost you poor poor students nothing.

Fair enough, except there isnt an Australian university I know of that teaches using Open Source tools, at least, in the fields that require Office tools.

We've all been taught using Microsoft Office, I'm comfortable with it, I know how to use it, and when you're writing research papers that require extremely specific formatting, I'm not going to waste my time trying to produce the same result on Open Office, when I've already been shown dozens of times how to do it in MS Office.

OSS software Is useless for a student unless the educational institution is teaching it, and they're definitely not teaching it to me. Until they do, I'll gladly shell out $75 for a $1050 software suite.
It's funny how all the OSS advocates get bitter about things like this, "Microsoft is still leveraging It's monopoly!" Well guess what, if there was an OSS app that was better than the Microsoft alternative, then It'd be used as standard within a university environment.

Ive yet to see that happen, outside of OSS programming tools.