Canadian academia and open source

[James Knott]

Marc Lijour wrote:
>>>>> I guess you missed this.
>>>>>
>>>>> <http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2004-05/sunflash.20040527.1.html
>>>> No, it was discussed.  I believe the opinions were that they were buying
>>>> a commercial product (StarOffice) not OpenOffice.  The point was that
>>>> the heavily funded and beaucratic school boards in Ontario will always
>>>> buy the commerical software and most of them are heavily biased against
>>>> installing Linux or using open source because they don't care about
>>>> price--they can always pass the cost back to the government.
>>>>
>>>> This is compared to the UK where the school board are run differently
>>>> and Linux and open source are more attractive options and meeting with
>>>> much success.
>>> 1) I believe the "educational" StarOffice licence is free.
>>> 2) People using StarOffice at school are more likely to consider
>>> OpenOffice elsewhere, than those who've only used MS Office.
>> Forgot to mention, StarOffice is built on OpenOffice.
> 
> StarOffice is free for Education (see license).
> Buying the CD would cost you a flat fee of 25$, which was of great value 
> because the admin gets to install and carry the CD everywhere he wants plus 
> it had some add-on I believe (manual?). Talking about manual, SO-OOo are 
> fully localized and SO comes with a 500+ pages manual and OOo is starting to 
> get pretty good tutorials of all kinds online (prepared classroom material).
> 
> I work in a high-school and the board is becoming tougher and tougher. I 
> cannot even have access to the username list of my students, forget about 
> setting up accounts, install programs, and give an opinion. Behind me there 
> are other generations of frustrated teachers.
> My point is this: the politics at the board and whether or not they are 
> knowledgeable will rule your day-to-day life.
> I have offered countless times free advice, help, web application to respond 
> to some needs, programs, network evaluations, and so on. And basically all is 
> ignored.
> However there is a HUGE potential for improvement, even if limiting the scope 
> to sync with today's technology (move from win98 to XP at least, or better 
> Linux), move from VB apps to more solid and user-friendly apps, ...

At the top of this message is a link I provided about the Ministry of
Education arranging for StarOffice for all Ontario students.  Have you
seen that in your school? If not, perhaps you could remind someone about it.
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml