“In our early evaluation, we recognised that there are certain parts of Open Office that are not equal in functionality to Microsoft Office 2003,” said Quinn. “There are two main areas. One is in the way people create spreadsheets and the other is in some of the very advanced features of Power Point. If you look at the way people use the desktop, that is a very, very small contingent of the entire populace.

“Give Alan and Microsoft their due, but the reality is most of the people don’t use all those advanced features so it begs the question as to why I would spend all that money – advanced or not. When you buy the best Mercedes, it probably has features that far surpass those of the general automobile populace but how many people use those or need those in their daily routine. Technological superiority is wonderful but at the end of the day if people aren’t using it, then it becomes a great big so what.”

According to Quinn, the quality and reliability of open source software is generally better than the proprietary equivalent.

“If you put something out into the community, then you will have the best and the brightest looking at it. If you’re in a proprietary firm, then you may have very great people but you only have so many eyes. So if there’s a security problem, then it gets discovered because you have so many people coming at it from so many perspectives.”

Quinn believes the huge cost differential between open source and Microsoft software, the groundswell of open source tools hitting the market and the delay of new Microsoft software releases may combine to create what he calls the perfect storm for open source in 2006.

Quinn, who was initially lambasted by Massachusets software industry in 2003 because of his pioneering open source strategy, says every software player in the industry except Microsoft eventually came around to believing that open source was a good thing.