Alex's Journal

The other day I was in the library at the university here in Germany and I used one of the university computers. I haven’t really used the computers at the university all that much, but when I have, I’ve always used Firefox since they have it installed on all of their computers and I prefer Firefox. Since I use a PowerPC-based Mac, I don’t have access to any version of Internet Explorer except for the woefully outdated version for Mac OS X and Mac OS 9. I therefore thought that while I was at the university, it would be a good time to check compatibility in Internet Explorer for several of my websites. I clicked on the dreadful little blue e in the quick launch bar and to my surprise, Internet Explorer opened and then immediately closed. I was quite confused for a second and decided to try again. I tried again and got the same result. That was certainly strange I thought, so I logged out and tried at a different computer — same result.

I was able to guess that the university had probably blocked the use of Internet Explorer on its computers, but I suppose I couldn’t really believe it. After all, it is a Microsoft product (there is supposed to be a hint of sarcasm there). So, I went and asked the guy working at the tech desk in the library if they had actually blocked it and to my pleasant surprise, he said they indeed had blocked it for safety purposes.

At my university in the United States, I don’t think this would happen — or at least I have never seen it happen. American universities seem to have a fixation for Microsoft products, whether it be Internet Explorer, Office or Outlook. The on-campus computers at my American university do not even have Firefox installed, much less block access to Internet Explorer.

Something else I have noticed about the computers at my German university is that they also use OpenOffice.org as their default office suite. While they do also have Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word is not the default application to open when you open a .doc file; Microsoft Excel is not the first to open when you click on a .xls; and Microsoft PowerPoint is not the first to open when you click on a .ppt file. Instead, they always open in OpenOffice.org by default. I find this to be quite comforting.

Using open source software seems to be an overall trend that is incredibly common here in Europe. In lectures, for example, you see students with their laptops and more often than not, they are browsing the web with Firefox and taking notes with OpenOffice.org. That applies to both Windows and Mac users. I have also noticed a lot more Linux users here than back home in the United States. A lot of the Linux users I have seen and talked to are not even the geeky, computer-whiz type (such as I) that Linux is generally associated with. They are just average users who might not even be able to distinguish the operating system from an application.

The popularity of open source software is a trend I hope will eventually carry over to the United States, although, realistically, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Unlike Europe, everything is far more commercialized in the United States and with that commercialization comes proprietary software that consumers will be willing to buy versus download their free, open source counterparts.