Dear Mr. Tiemann:

I very much appreciated your quotations in today's Inter@ctive Week
piece on "The Microsoft-Free Office". They were a breath of fresh air.
I especially enjoyed the second-hand smoke analogy, and may borrow it
(with attribution).

It always annoys me when alleged leaders of the open-source movement
such as Mr. [omitted] (likewise quoted in the article) make excuses for
what amounts, in the final analysis, to a lack of leadership within
their companies, on this matter.

(Also, if [omitted]'s firm "uses Linux on every desktop", it's news to me.
My own efforts to set policy as chief sysadmin and de-facto IS Dept. head were
sabotaged at the executive and department-head levels. When I resigned
in November, I had in fact barely averted an executive order to make
qmail rewrite outgoing mail headers to conceal widespread use of MS
Outlook and MS Outlook Express, by asking what would happen if this act
of concealment came to be publicly known.)