I'm tempted to not encourage that kind of statement with a response... but...

It's not that I have expectations from M$ products. I just have a lot of faith in open source to provide solutions, even in the face of closed source products.

I just read a post (ironically, from "Last Weeks's Worst Posts" list), where the Gnumeric office suite was suggested as an option for working with Excel documents. That looks like a great open source product (fully supporting Excel files, among others). Unfortunately, I didn't see where it had a Perl interface to it. (It did say that you could write Python plug-ins... hrumph).

<rant>
So, closed source isn't the problem. It just makes us work for it a little longer/harder. I guess that's the period of time that the guys in Redmond need to make enough of a profit to "pretty up" their interfaces and GUIs to dazzle most of the windoze users into thinking that there's nothing else out there besides Windows.
</rant>

Sorry... was that my out-loud voice?
-Dave