“Tools: on a software level, I tend to be fanatical about cross-platform portability. I dislike Windows, but am able to use it; I mostly run Macs, but keep one foot in the Linux pool. My core tools are: Thunderbird (for email), Firefox (web browser), OpenOffice (office suite), and Vim (text editor). It’s no coincidence that they’re all open source, and run on Windows/Mac/Linux. I want to maintain ownership of my data — my business cycle is so radically different from that of the usual customers of, say, Microsoft, that I don’t want to entrust my writing to any format I can’t to some extent reverse-engineer. (Novels, for example, can remain in print for 30 years if you’re lucky; but your average business document is a fossil at 3. Ditto magazine features.) I’d stick to UTF-8 and RestructuredText files if publishers didn’t have a Microsoft Word fetish — that’s where OpenOffice comes in.”
3.5 out of 5
http://www.badlanguage.net/interview-with-sci-fi-author-charles-stross
