Office applications Toolkit

Story: OpenOffice developers clear Visual Studio licensing hurdle

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So why do so many people use .Net? They must be like sheep. This is really expensive - even in comparison with a developer's salary in the UK. You can't surely claim that any productivity advantages over something like Eclipse and Java outweigh that amount of spending per developer.

Java is far more mature than Dot-Net. It's been around longer and that shows in the language. Eclipse is incredibly productive - and it's free! Java runtimes and server environment are available for free and it doesn't lock you into a platform.

Afraid of running on a free server? You shouldn't be. Most of the web runs on Apache, and that's despite Microsoft now bundling IIS with Windows Server. If you want though, you can buy a fully supported production environment from a choice of vendors.

I just can't understand why people are paying for Dot-Net. Especially as it seems the main argument for it is familiarity for VB programmers, which isn't there either as Dot-Net uses a very different programming model to old VB.

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