Microsoft Softwares - Non Pirated

My friend called me, and said,

He: I am going to buy Visual Studio. Which version is better?
Me: 2008 is latest. 2005 is also fine. But, why do you want to spend Rs.1,00,000 for Visual Studio.
He: No. I am going to buy Rs.150 Visual Studio.

I use only free and open source software. I don't use any software of M$, because, I don't want to buy their software and at the same time I don't want to pirate their software.

There are many people who advocate me to use M$ software. But, none of them use original softwares. There are handful of people (whom I know) who bought original Windows software. But, they have bought only OS, and they don't use any other software other than IE in that machine. Since, they are using original versions, they get unlimited right to preach me to use M$ software.

I would like to tell only one thing to those people. I need the following.

• Should be able to work on 2 Computers
  
• Doing simple operations with images daily, and complex operations (which are not supported by paint) once in a while.
  
• Developing One new software useful for atleast one person in this world for every 6 months.
  
• Data Analysis of 1 GB of unstructured data
  
• Answering certain set of questions in less than one minute from the above data, and even a normal data entry operator should be able to use within less than one hour training.
  
• Helping friends in their projects.
  
• Playing simple games like lines, chess, gnibbles.
  
• All the above should be done when in offline as well.
  
• Bing may give good results for US users. But, it does not give good results for India specific queries. Google is far better than bing for my usage.
  

Are you ready to do the above with your preferred softwares?

I am doing those with ZERO software cost. I am not consuming more time when compared to the many developers of my experience. If anyone can do it efficiently than me, then I would be definitely interested in doing their way.

I hope those who preach about M$ software know the way to calculate the efficiency.

Let's suppose, their approach takes X days with expenditure E, and I take Y days and my daily salary is S. The expenditure includes costs of all the software and the additional required things like anti-virus, anti-spyware and documentation etc.

Then, with their approach, I save, (Y-X)*S - E.

With the work that I have done in the last one year, even if I make X as zero, still, I would be at loss, if I use all M$ software instead of open source software.

Anybody who is going to advocate me about using M$ software, please show me the profit in using it. Then I will automatically start using it. I am also looking for reducing my cost (due to recession ;) ).