Software *NOT* worth paying for

So yesterday, I wrote about software that was definitely worth paying for, I now will list some programs that I feel are definitely *NOT* worth paying for.

Microsoft Office

Probably the biggest steaming pile of crap that I know of. With alternatives such as OpenOffice.org or NeoOffice, there is no excuse to even use MS Office. The open source alternatives are just as good at opening the proprietary document formats as MS Office is itself in most cases. In fact, you can even use OpenOffice to recover corrupt Microsoft Office files that MS Office can't even open itself.

I really see no saving grace in Microsoft Office.

Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator

Don't even bother plunking down nearly $500 each for these programs. Try the Gimp (Photoshop replacement) or Inkscape (Illustrator replacement). Both do an excellent job, and are very full featured. My only complaint about both of them is that they are very lacking in their documentation. Both applications come in a Windows, Linux, and Mac OS version.

Microsoft Virtual PC

Slow, buggy, and very annoying at times, stay away from Virtual PC. As mentioned before, use VMWare instead.

Unfortunately, for those of us using Mac OS on PowerPC, you're stuck with VPC. For Mac on Intel, it appears that Parallels has some promise.

JBuilder

I used to sing the praises of JBuilder - I really liked it. I had tried NetBeans, and early versions of Eclipse, and neither of them really stacked up. However, recent versions of Eclipse (3.1 and on) have been AMAZING!

I'm never going back to JBuilder - I'm an Eclipse guy now, all the way.

Well - that's the roundup for now. Basically, any application that has a workable open-source alternative is a great candidate for me to put on this list.