Re: Business Plan Writing Helper

[Stanley A. Klein]

SCORE is the Service Corps of Retired Executives, which is sponsored by the
US Small Business Administration.  If the documents in question were
produced by the US Government, they are in the public domain.

I haven't looked at the documents, but the fact they are on the M$ web site
doesn't automatically make them non-free software.  They may well be
something someone could download without restriction and work on under
OpenOffice.org.   That is, unless M$ has tweaked them to deliberately make
them incompatible for monopoly-preservation purposes.  

I looked at the SCORE web site and found a lot of stuff that someone could
use as the basis of a business plan tool.  And if the work is done in
OpenOffice.org, there might well be an easy way to get data from gnue into
the business plan documents.

One problem -- that requires a level of educational outreach -- is that
some people think common office documents are synonymous with the
corresponding M$ tools, i.e., spreadsheets become "Excel spreadsheets" and
presentations become "Powerpoint presentations".  That is simple ignorance,
and we should try to correct it.  But the fact that some people do common
documents using non-free tools doesn't make the documents non-free if there
is a free tool that can read and edit them.


Stan Klein



At 12:03 PM 3/25/2003 -0500, Derek Neighbors <address@hidden> wrote:


>I respectfully request that we not use this list to point people to
>non-free software.  It goes against the spirit of the GNU project.  If
>you wish to point them to things so that they can write replacements
>that is one thing, but encouraging them to use them is another.
>
>You can always email them privately and let them know of alternatives.=20
>I just would hate to see this list become an advertising plank for
>non-free software.
>
>
>On Tue, 2003-03-25 at 03:34, Luca Cotta Ramusino wrote:
>> There's something in the template gallery, under Finance &
>> Accounting>>Business Plans & Financial Statements
>>=20
>> http://search.officeupdate.microsoft.com/TemplateGallery/ct144.asp
>>=20
>> There's a word doc with instructions for the narrative part, and it conta=
>ins
>> links to the spreadsheets. The templates were provided by SCORE
>> (http://www.score.org), and you could do worse than check their website.