I wrote a post back in February about whether open source software should come pre-installed on both Microsoft's and Apple's operating systems. As I have used open source software more and more over a period of weeks my views have changed slightly.

I use an Apple MacBook Pro with BootCamp running Windows 7 on a partition of my hard drive. To be honest, I am an Apple fan, and therefore rarely use Windows 7 as I prefer Snow Leopard.

When using Snow Leopard, it surprised me when I thought about my most used applications. I use Google Chrome as my primary web browser of choice, and personally believe it blows Firefox, Opera and Safari out of the water; don't get me started with my views on Internet Explorer! For media playback I use VLC Media Player, due to it's extensive file format support, and therefore rarely use Apple's QuickTime Player or iTunes. For FTP management I use FileZilla, an extremely powerful client that puts many similar paid software alternatives to shame. For document work I use NeoOffice, a great Mac alternative to both Microsoft Office and Apple's iWork suite. It does the job fine, and doesn't cost the astronomical amount that Microsoft charge. For my archiving tasks I use The Unarchiver; powerful extraction software that is better than Apple's bundled efforts.

"I'm a huge supporter of the free software movement."
Gregory Papadopoulos (Sun Microsystems)

So, to be honest, I use open source software for the majority of my computing tasks everyday. Well known corporation efforts just aren't as good in my opinion. Therefore, my original view of open source software being pre-installed from an out-of-the-box state remains the same, and stronger now than ever!