My long-time observation is that compatibility is one of areas where open source really shines. Wine is a highly successful project, and so is Dosbox. OpenOffic

My long-time observation is that compatibility is one of areas where open source really shines. Wine is a highly successful project, and so is Dosbox. OpenOffice, LibreOffice go to great lengths to achieve .doc compatibility. While OSS tends to suffer in creativity department (you mostly get free X - free photoshop-like program, free Word, FreeCiv, countless Quake1 clones, and heaps of "clone" games), compatibility of OSS is unmatched.