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No-Cost StarOffice Licensing for Institutions

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the coming-soon dept.

eugene ts wong writes: "A while ago Sun announced that it was giving unlimited donation of StarOffice to China's Ministry of Education. Well, it turns out that they announced that they are giving unlimited no-cost licenses for all education and research institutions." Many college students now get drastic discounts on Microsoft Office - but this covers a much broader range, from kindergarten up.

6 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Go Sun GO! by G00F · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Its nice seeing Sun take the ball and run, even though some of their thigns arn't making sense. (like the new cost of Solaris) I do like how Sun creates cross platform/os/network things. I just hope they keep them open once all the MS monopolies are broken and they have the lead.

    This is a really good stratigy to moving(breaking MS "other" monopoly) into business. Open source/free program that can do most things Staroffice can, staroffice being a more polished product with more features being charged a low amount, but giving free to all places that where people would be inclined to bring it into a place where it could make money.

    I haven't used the new star office yet, but I do know that the old one had major flaws with office files.(saving) Also, it has some anoying features I have to fight with, and can't find the options to. But other than that, its a very nice product.

    --
    The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
    1. Re:Go Sun GO! by Captain+Pooh · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Walt Mossengburg of the Wall Street Journal(I don't know if I spelled his last name right) said that StarOffice is not consumer friendly and that Sun doesn't know how to talk to consumers because they mostly do Enterprise stuff. But I think he missed some points, like If I just wanted to write a report I could use StarOffice instead of paying for MS Office which is really expensive and have things I don't need. My point is StarOffice is an alternative if you want to do simple tasks as word processing and such without all the other business features which is geared to executives.

  2. Education Distro? by scaramush · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Okay, given this, and the recent spate of MS educational license nut cracking, it seems like there's a real need for a special linux distro designed for educational centers.

    Having run a college lab, I know the major barrier to adoption was ease of use -- you don't want your lab CAs having to spend hours explaining a shell to drama majors (or professors, for that matter). But what about a very simple desktop (similar to Apple's old easyfinder (I can't remember what it was called) specially prepared for educational students?

    I mean, throw together a dist that's user friendly, that has Star Office, some pre-canned ghost like functions (for labs) and a grading app for teachers, and I think educational instiutions big and small would be falling all over themselves to adopt it.

    --
    "...you can steal my woman, but you ain't done nuthin' smart."
  3. Cheap MS products by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you want cheap ms products(OS's, OFFICE, Visual Studio, ect...) Go to your local university, find a college bar and offer some broke student 50 bucks to log into the website and order the software for you. You can pick up visual studio, office xp, and windows xp for 30 dollars a piece. Add in the 50 bucks you gave the kid and you have the whole set for 140 dollars.

    If you don't think many students would be interested, I think you have forgotten how broke students are and how much cheap beer 50 bucks will buy.

  4. Well, this free licensing... by Beyond+Redemption · · Score: 3, Interesting

    would really work if they *gasp* made a version compatible with the system that HALF of all public schools use. It shouldn't be that hard to port the linux version over to OS X. Microsoft is just laughing at Sun for forgetting about HALF of the computers in schools.

  5. Re:So, let me get this straight... by happyclam · · Score: 4, Interesting
    ..StarOffice WAS free... but now its no longer free, so now it's free instead.

    I'm telling you, Sun's "Insanity First!" initiative is REAL!

    Actually, it's terrific. Here's why: The major barrier to adoption of free software in institutions is fear: fear of using something unsupported, fear of having to maintain it themselves, fear that it won't work, fear that it's got back doors in it... we've all heard that "no one ever got fired for buying IBM."

    So Sun has this great product that they can't give away for free because it comes from free software roots. So what do they do? Start charging for it. This legitimizes the product in the minds of the PHBs, small as those minds are. Then they say they'll give it away for free if you qualify in some way. So the PHBs all scurry around to see whether they qualify, and when they figure out they do, they jump at this terrific discount from a well-known, strong company.

    Having served time in the marketing end of software, I know that "Insanity First" is often the only way actually to succeed.

    --
    He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."