What I mean is, I open ms office documents, spreadsheets and powerpoint
presentations from others all the time. If need be, I can fire up the
peecee emulator and run ms office 2003 on my ubuntu desktop, if the
document they are sending me is insanely, intricately tied to specific
ms office features, but in most cases, open office works fine for all
these files.


When I was in college, the school was using java (a wise choice since
it's cross platform) as the standard language for computer science
courses, and I would code at night on my linux system, then send the jar
file to my team mate, who used windows, and he had no trouble running
the program on his pc.

Naturally if we were compiling c++ programs or something that would be a
different story.