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No-Cost StarOffice Licensing for Institutions
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.
Why would anyone use StarOffice, M$Office? When openOffice is there?
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Do /. users get free licenses then? Most of them belong in institutions...
Many college students now get drastic discounts on Microsoft Office
;)
Microsoft offered the same deal that Sun did when I was a college student -- no wait, I stole it.
-Turkey
-Turkey
This is great news!
Here in Maryland, the state universities pay a massive license fee that covers every student attending, so they can pay for the cost of media only ($5, real expensive cdrs). But that money comes from your tuition anyways, so the savings are all only perceived...better off using StarOffice, and dropping that license, and saving some of that tuition money for better purposes (I want the old studen center made into a lasertag arena personally, but other improvements could apply too).
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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.
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I think this is great news, primarily for those schools in the NW who were targetted with audits by Microsoft as they are moving towards Linux. Not only do they have a more stable/secure environment to work in but also a very nice office suite... for gratis.
So far, I'm quite impressed with OpenOffice.org 1.0 on my Windows machine, though some of the files that I need to open won't since it doesn't work with Macros or data pulls from a SQL Server or an Access file.
Wow. The Microsoft hired trolls got here quick, didn't they?
I know that at Queens University, the students don't buy individual packages of software anyway, at least not the engineers. We buy a $200 package of everything we'll need for our 4 years there - MS Office, good telnet client, Maple, matlab, etc. etc. So I don't know that this will make that much difference - it's not like the engineers have a choice...
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will I be able to download or buy (for nominal fee) a copy of Star Office on my own or do I have to ask my school, faculty etc to get it for me? I think this is a great news
Many college students now get drastic discounts on Microsoft Office
Not quite. Typically the school purchases licenses from MS and then discounts them to students or, in the case of my school, just plain gives them a license (or 2 in the case of Office XP). Guess where the money to but those licenses comes from? Yup - tuition.
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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.
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Firstly, this is excellent news.
However, one thing that Sun must still address is how to increase their adoption in the corporate sector.
The reason why colleges are requested to stock Microsoft Office is that is what the businesses use to whom they are applying for jobs.
My last university, McMaster University used to stock nothing but Corel office (cheaper, helped to support a local business), but in about 1997, they bowed to student pressure to replace it with MS Office since the commerce/science/arts/etc students wanted to have the "strong proficiency with advanced Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Access" on their resumes to compete for their jobmarkets.
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As the website states, "$85/campus for support". That's truly amazing, and especially so when you realize that they're going to get a ton of calls about some of the translation from M$ formatted docs to SO formatted docs. I'm sure that it doesn't seem so bad when you're looking at supporting small colleges, but what about the Ohio State's, Michigan State's with around 50,000 students per campus? Also, what about state systems like UC and SUNY? What constitutes a cam pus? Is SUNY-Albany covered if SUNY-Buffalo gets support?
The only caveat here is getting campuses to support two office suites, since you know that the overwhelming majority aren't going to just pick up and move over to SO and leave M$Office behind in one fell swoop. Initially, those who decide to adopt SO will have to transition users into using SO instead of M$Office, and that means more support costs for the campus IT personnel.
Of course, get a few students who want instant resume material (read: participated in a major campus-wide application migration project), and it might not be an issue.
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If you haven't tried Star Office or Open Office, try Open Office. It's free. It's excellent. Of the free word processors, it seems to be the best.
I've had a lot of problems with Microsoft Word being quirky. Sometimes Microsoft Word will move a footer to the top of the following page, for example. I don't have a huge amount of experience with Open Office, version 1.0 was released on May 1, I think, but it doesn't seem quirky.
That is one of the best news I've heard from Corporate America in a while.
Feel free to rip off businesses; they've got the money anyway.
But the schools should get free software, or at least heavily discounted, software.
After all, Let's think about the children!.
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.
Instead of RedStar Office, as I suggested previously, how about AllStar Office?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Now that any educational system can get StarOffice for free, we don't have to worry about our kids vandalizing computers when they see Clippy appear on the desktop.
It's terrible. I used the SO6 beta for a while, and switched to OpenOffice 1.0 when it came out, and ye gods the checker is awful. It's better than it was in the older betas, but it's nowhere near the quality of the one in commercial SO releases.
As a student I'm all for this; I like star office (well right now I have open office) better than the M$ stuff.
But sun isn't doing this out the kindness of their hearts. The idea is if student use their product from k-college then when they get into business they will buy full versions for companies. Apple tried something similar, but it never quite took hold. Also, becuase StarOffice is able to save as M$ formats, but M$ cannot read StarOffice format (atleast last I checked), well it seems to say that M$ does not have to worry about Sun, yet, but Sun has to worry about M$.
If sun is successful; we'll be seeing businesses switch to StarOffice, just as soon as the kids grow up. Does this mean that Sun thinks StarOffice will still be around in 20 years? Sure seems like it.
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The US government should fund all of China with MS software. Just think of how easy it would be to spy on them with all the security holes!
Sun must still address is how to increase their adoption in the corporate sector
;)
Remember Apple? They gave away free Mac's to schools. After the students graduated, a good portion of them found that since they were already used to using Mac's, it was easier for them to buy a Mac than it was to get a PC.
Sun is thinking the same way.
They're going to give it away to schools, the same schools where the future admins/managers/workers are coming from. If the admin/manager/worker has already worked with StarOffice and is comfortable with it, they will be more apt to push for that solution rather than paying $x+xxx for the M$ solution.
It's almost like drugs.. at first, you give it away for free. Eventually, they'll get hooked on it and come pay you for more!
---
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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.
Can any of the further development that goes into StarOffice be put into OpenOffice?
... so, in other words, Microsoft gives an actual student discount (go right ahead and ask them - they will give you a discount), but Sun only gives it to institutions? What crap is that?!
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I'm surprised they're not trying to spin things like this the way most other software donations work. "We just donated one hundred billion dollars *coughOfSoftwarecough* to all the little kiddies."
Or maybe it's just because "We just donated infinity dollars..." would make it sound like the silliness it actually is.
Random and weird software I've written.
When I was a full time student I regularly checked on what discounts were available to me on various software packages. In general I found them to be not enough to be relevant. They didn't make them affordable to the average student, just less than you would pay through any other legitimate source.
Now that I've discovered GIMP and OpenOffice, though, it's largely irrelevant. They do everything I would use the various Adobe or MS packages for, and the price is right.
This is still good news, though. I would love to see StarOffice take over in schools. That would make things much easier for me as an OpenOffice user.
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This is funny, since my mom-in-law was just in town last weekend and we talked at length about StarOffice. She is the director of a large educational outreach program in a large midwestern US state, designed to get poorer school disricts online with current technologies.
I love my mother-in-law, she is awesome. She has an advanced degree and an uncanny ability to understand where things are going and why they are important in the grand scheme of things. The devil is in the details though... she can't understand StarOffice very well at all, from a UI point of view.
All of her project schools are going to get StarOffice, and all of her staff is undergoing training. The problem is that they have been using MSOffice for so long, they dcan't be "untrained" easily at all. She says the third graders pick up StarOffice - piece of cake... but for the people in charge... teachers, administrators, etc, StarOffice is counter-intuitive.
So the question begs... even if it is free, and can do everything they need, will it work?
Just my thoughts on the matter.
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...but this may be a place to start undermining that sad home truth. I wish more software companies (like Corel, hint, hint?) would do this.
As a WordPerfect freak (no flames, please, I'm a wordsmith and it's a crafter's tool) who works for a Corel VAR (among other things), I still sit in front of MS-Office all day. Why? Even though my current project is an ideal FrameMaker (or your designated alternate here) job, the guy on the other end wants Word files.
Similarly, when I don't have a job, it's convenient to be able to send resumes from home in Word for the clueless recruiters who can't (or won't) open anything else, since I don't imagine we're ever going to see complete M$/everything else document interoperability anytime before the Tuesday after Doomsday.
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Microsoft offers a similar deal to K-12 students and faculty (for use OUTSIDE of the school, according to EULA. Microsoft doesn't typically release those prices to the public)
K-12 Students and faculty can get Office XP Full for $149 (a 70% discount).
Of course, Sun offers no indication of offering the products to students for use at home (for school related work, of course!)
One can only wonder HOW microsoft can legally enforce their EULA on the K-12 Office, as it only permits it to be used by students (not parents) for work relating to school.
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This LOOKS like this applies not only to traditional universities, but the for-profit Devrys of the world. Interesting, compared to the standard "non-commercial" stuff.
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Once the students get familiar with StarOffice, or any other free Office application, they can enter the workplace and use StarOffice rather than MS Office. As long as the documents are portable between the two, then there's no reason why people won't switch over to StarOffice.
They are still not sufficient to be comparable with M$ Office.
:)
No, but they're really, really close.
What the Linux community NEEDS to get in its (collective)head is that the desktop will STILL be RULED by M$ until XXXOffice (Open/Star/etc) has a Word package that COMPLETELY pulls in ALL M$ Word docs AND something that TRULY functions as M$ Outlook and can pull in PST files. Until this happens M$ will continue to RULE the desktop.
Again, we're almost there with the functionality of Star/Open Office and Evolution. I'd say that we're at about an 80% compatibility level with MS products, for two reasons: simple file r/w, and Evolution only functions as a full Outlook-compatible client with a proprietary add-in package (Connector).
BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY... WITHOUT something that can "BORG in" (assimilate) M$ DOCs, Outlook, and XLS there is NO CHANCE Linux will topple M$. The package does not even have to have "all" the capabilities as long as it can pull in the file (doc, pst, xls) not crash and have the file look "almost" exactly like it did in M$ Office and we have a chance for a REAL revolution on the desktop.
Two points here - Lycoris (I know, I know), wine, and again, 80% with the others. Consider the possibility of getting certain departments or portions of these institutions switched over to free software; departments that don't need full compatibility or feature lists.
People seem to forget that the WAY to WIN is to ASSIMILATE. M$ proved that SO MANY times over. How did I get sucked into Outlook the first time before my Corporate experience? Fire up Outlook and it says "Hey I see you have a Netscape email account... Want me to pull that info into Outlook for you?" Sure I said just to see how effective it was and to my supprise is got everything without one error. So I used it for a couple of days... It out does ANY email system out there. The ONLY MAJOR caveat is the F*%king security problems and we ALL know about those. BUT, it is FAR more effective at email/scheduler/contacts controller than anything else.
I've heard that Evolution is pretty good at importing mail as well, and it includes the calendar/scheduler/contacts functionality, minus the security issues. Netscape mail has always done a good job for me, as far as imports go.
MY $0.02
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But on a lighter note, this can only be good, folks. Hopefully, over the course of time, this will devalue the Microsoft Office suite to the point where Microsoft will either have to give it away for free, or will no longer able to charge such exorbitant licensing fees (a $79 version of Office wouldn't be bad...) Consumers, regardless of which office suite they choose, will benefit.
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*sigh*
the core is open sourced.
but im guessing that if you really cared about this, that you would already know that.
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As stated here I think Sun should consider adding something along these lines:
:)
An additional benefit of the agreement allows each Purdue faculty and staff member and each Purdue student to install and use the selected Microsoft products on one computer that he or she owns, for University-related work.
For additional effect. Ah, well, it's a step in the right direction. I should also add, that SO has been on all of our lab computers for several years. Now we just need to get rid of / replace the rest of that junk
Work on an OS X version of OpenOffice/StarOffice has been underway for a good while now. In fact if you bothered to visit the OpenOffice.org web site you'd see that there is already a Developer's Build of OpenOffice.org 1.0 available for download.
You're right, free StarOffice for OS X would be a most excellent idea for educational institutions.
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I agree we are "getting" close. I just do not like seeing(reading) "we got it!!! we got it!!!" when in fact they don't. On top of this so many people that I have talked with (in the linux community) just don't "get it" that until we (linux users) can assimilate M$ data "perfectly" (99%) we cannot topple them. To many large companies have TOO much invested in the way they do biz. If there was an alternative that not only assimilated but installed and connected/integrated with Exchange without flaw it would be a no brainer as an IT person to just buy the "new" sytems with linux and ???Office installed. This would "slowly" phase out M$.
Believe me when I say that _when_ linux gets to that point I will be one of the loudest and devoted clerics. ;)
Seriously though, I do not like M$ and I DETEST their open arrogance (we know what is best for you), but I have to admit I like Office.
Thanks for the change and the attitude check.
I think that it would be great if colleges sold CDs with Star Office to make it easier for students who don't want to download the software. The students can pay for the disk and the time that it took to copy the cd. Is $5 asking too much?
testing out my trending skills
I hope that proffessors would encourage students to use Star Office by allowing them to hand in essays in Star Office format. Perhaps, the students can hand in the essays on disk or as an email attachment?
testing out my trending skills
Quark Express is the standard in layout and design software. It's also a horrible piece of crap, but we won't get into that.
A single-user license for Quark 5 costs (IIRC) $900. However, universities can buy an 8 license package for $800, with the ability to add licenses later for $99 each. Thus, everyone learns Quark in school, and it stays entrenched in businesses because it's easy to find people who know it (trust me, I really didn't want to buy Quark again, but I just did, because I basically have to). Plus, that's what most printing places accept, because it's the most popular...and so that's what they teach in schools so that their students can graduate and get jobs. Begin again.
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isn't this ONE of the reasons M$ got into trouble in the first place?
as long as sombody is charging for a comprable product, you can't give it away. it's NOT FAIR!
as much as i hate M$ i hate people who look to the government to "save" them. the more government does FOR you... the more government can DO to you.
if the government decides to go after Sun for it's anti competitive practices... i'm gonna laugh.
I hire about 10 people a year and "strong proficiency with advanced Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Access" is one thing that drives me up the wall. We are an ISV, so the ability to use a standard computer GUI program should be a self evident requirement. Especially when this usually means that the applicants are able to type a letter in Word, open an Excel spreadsheet and can fill out a query form in Access. A couple of other favorite skills on the resumes that I get:
-Internet Explorer
-HTML (7 tags)
-Windows (sometimes broken out into 95/.../XP)
-Email (ye gods!!!)
I am waiting for the one that lists "able to dial a phone number" as a skill.
But this is not only North America, but pretty much every country. And it also bites another way, I actually stopped listing my computer skills in my resume, because recruiters seem to put me into an "overqualified" box all the time.
As soon as an open-sourced piece of software is written that IS fully compatible, as you envision, Microsoft will just change the formatting of the files, or will have it check to see what program it's interfacing with. Remember MS-DOS and Win 3.1? If Win didn't detect MS-DOS, then it wouldn't work. wouldn't be hard here, either. That's why StarOffice/OpenOffice.org does NOT have perfect MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Etc file filters...Microsoft keeps the file format private, so for the files to be opened as good as they do (I've used both...works great under StarOffice 6.0 beta/OpenOffice.org 1.0). If you can get Microsoft to willingly open up their file formats, do it. Same with Outlook/Exchange. Until Microsoft does, we will never see a piece of software that perfectly integrates with Outlook OR Exchange.
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Nice ploy by Sun to steal the corporate market in the long term, get the future leaders of big business hooked on your juarez while they are in college and reap the rewards when they are people doing the purchasing in a few years time.
Not that M$ ever did that by offering free OS and Software to folks in "educational" establishments, oh wait....
The Final Word
..." Companies considering a switch to StarOffice or a competing product won't find the move cheap. Gartner estimates that the average cost per user would be about $1,200, which works out to about $800 for labor and $400 for productivity. In contrast, companies upgrading to Office every two years would spend about $550 per user, or $700 every four years. That means many businesses would take eight years to recover their initial investment."
That is from here.
How is a person doing a network install costing their company $800 per machine? What kind of hourly rate is that?
As the father of 3 home schooled children do they qualify as an "institution"?
We'd like to know a little bit about you for our files
... one thing that Sun must still address is how to increase their adoption in the corporate sector.
Sun says that's why they're charging for Star Office in the first place (rather than just open-sourcing it). They want to achieve penetration in businesses that are used to paying through the nose for tools such as Microsoft Office and think free software means amateur crudware.
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I find the spell checker to not be good at giving guesses - it sounds like your major qualifier of what makes a good spell checker is whether or not it has words you know are spelled right. I find Office to give better guesses at words I don't know how to spell just right.
If they would include an interface to Google API, which has a spell chechker, that would be great. When you right-click a word there could be a "Google Suggestion" selection. As it is, I often open up Google as a last resort to find how to spell a word as it has a better spell checker then Office (though it dictionary is really big, including other languages and odd acroymns so it sometimes makes things difficult when you enter a word that is misspelled but Google doesn't think so. There should be a "pretend this word is misspelled" option.)
It's nice to craft your software for artists or the education market or even for the server market (and companies like Apple and Sun have done an OK job at these things). But what really keeps Microsoft flying high is that they cater to the biggest (but definitely NOT the sexiest) market: office workers and secretaries. If you want to beat them, you MUST play on that field.
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I'm not sure if I clarified it enough in my first post, but I do agree with you, wholeheartedly. I think there are two important things to keep in mind here: first, we (as the "clerics") have to push to get those departments that can work (and work well) with free software, to do it. Second, I'm not sure how feasible this is, but I think the trick with getting 99% is the PR that has to go along with it. We have to make sure that the relevant parties know without a doubt that there is an alternative which could lower the TCO by nearly half, maintain compatability, and is able to be launched with minimal effort. If we are successful at this, then the only remaining factor that will influence the overall acceptance of free software and their low-cost alternatives is the time that managers take to react and implement. If they are fast enough, we can immediately clamp down on that new market share, and assimilate/expand from there.
Craig
i gotta mostly agree with you on this, but i'm not so sure that 150M$ goes very far with keeping a software/hardware company afloat such as apple. hell a dot bomb with 60 employees (and actual revenue) couldn't sustain for 18 months on that cash (been there done that).
even before going out to play w/ the adults we realized that apple wasn't going to be the thing to do. the colleges might have had some apple labs for use, but business, comp sci, and accounting students were using the ibm pc's for everthing. i don't know what happened to the marketing droids, but that's gotta explain why they're always have a floor of their own.
Various jargon (like biological terms) dictionaries are sold though I don't know if by Microsoft.