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Ontario Schools License StarOffice
An anonymous reader writes "Sun Microsystems has signed a contract with the Ontario Ministry of Education in one of the biggest deals yet for its StarOffice software. It covers 72 public and parochial school boards in Ontario. All will be licensed to use StarOffice 7 on all school-owned PCs. Financial details weren't disclosed but Ontario school officials said the cost is 'minimal.'" Reader Apostata adds that the move "will see the application suite used by 2.5 million students. No word on whether it ships with 'Canadian English' pack ;)"
The Ontario school board used Word Perfect in the past, which made sense, giving money to an Ontario company. I don't know why they didn't just use OpenOffice now. Unless times have changed since I was in the Ontario school system it will only be used for word processing anyway.
The difference between OpenOffice.org and StarOffice is that it comes with licensing, support, and the odd extra feature included. Corporations use StarOffice as opposed to OpenOffice for the same reasons they use Red Hat as opposed to Gentoo (I said it, I'm putting on asbestos underwear, you can't hurt me!). In a corporate setting that support tends to save you a few headaches.
Disclaimer: I like Gentoo, I just wouldn't use it as a server OS in a large corporation or an educational setting.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
For anyone interested, here's (my interpretation of) the political and economic context in which this happened. This is a big win for OpenOffice, and I think this contextual information is relevant to the school boards decision to stop using MS Office.
Ontario, the most populous province in Canada, has had almost a decade of right- wing government: tax cuts and spending cuts. The economy has, on the whole, been pretty good but the debt and deficit have continued the rapid rise that began with the 89-93 recession.
Over this period the government has fought its main battles with the powerful teachers union to try and save money on their education budget.
In the recent election, both the incumbent right-wing party and the centrist party lied outrageouslly about what they could do in spite of the state of the budget. It seems that you have to do this to get elected these days. (The only party that told the truth about the budget got clobbered.)
The centrist party won the election and then had to come thru on its promises, which included a better relationship between gov't and teachers. This was clearly impossible, so they had to look at every conceivable way to save money without hurting teachers or letting any more schools fall apart. As usual, this exercise in cost cutting didn't yield even a fraction of what was promised, but it did get them to drop MS Office.
So, maybe debts, deficits, cuts, and politians aren't all bad.
But don't expect to see anything similar in big businesses. In my time doing systems consulting I found that, while government, small businesses, retail, and manufacturing were pretty strapped, most sectors of big business were wallowing in cash. The amount that these big companies are wasting on MS software is a tiny fraction of what they waste on all sorts of other things.
Expect to see more such moves if the Green Party of Canada comes to power in this month's federal election. Not that they will actually win the election, of course, but the Greens do explicitly support open source software in their platform
It is true. The original StarOffice was sold by a German company. It was pretty famous for being able to run on most OSes of the time.
Sun bought them out a few years later and opened the code. The OpenOffice code is based on this old StarOffice, even though today StarOffice is a derivate of OpenOffice.org.
I don't know about Canada, but here in the UK we have major problems with teacher recruitment and retention. The argument for teacher pay rises comes not from socialism but simple free market economics. If people are not paid enough then they will go and do something else instead. And at the moment, in teaching, plenty of people do.
... doesn't mean they'll use it. The TCDSB (Toronto Catholic school board) IT department is so pro-microsoft that even anything Mac related was not supported. Even when it had to do with cross-platform software like FileMaker (used for elementary report cards, and owned by APPLE!) IMHO, the policy was reversed only because schools were buying Macs out of their own budgets for media use/etc.
Their student information system (Trillium), developed either by the Ministry of Education, or at least by a few school boards, runs on Microsoft (SQL server with a horribly written front end, most likely in VB). The alternative (Oracle) wasn't well supported IIRC.
The grade 9 "intro to computer" and compsci courses are taught with Office & VB and from what I've seen tend to focus on learning those programs, not the general concepts.
(Where would I be if I focused on learning the 1993 version of Works, rather than generic database/spreadsheet concepts?)
Finally, if nothing else, their education agreement probably ensures that licensing is cheap enough and/or forced on every machine, or prevents them from installing competing software.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
Teaching in Ontario is considered a cushy, fat paying government job by most of this province's citizens. You're guaranteed 3 months+ per year of time off; there's "Professional Activity Days" where training comes during the school year for teachers, adding up to 5-10 days during the school year where students have 'days off'. This is infuriating as this training does not come during the 3 months paid leave in the summers, but during the children's learning curriculum.
The Ontario Teacher's Union is one of the most powerful unions in the country. Its almost impossible to be fire from the OTU. They're extremely active politically, and have been able to resist most modernisation efforts including: a) regular performance reviews of teachers, b) part time/replacement help, and c) mandatory training and skills progression. Sick days are essentially vacation days...you can accrue them gradually over your career and cash them in for $ or early retirement w/ full pay. I've seen teachers retire after 25 years service with almost a full school year off.
The OTU's indexed pension is LEGENDARY. Last I read it was considered the 2nd best pension in Canada, next to retired Ministers of Parliament. In some odd circumstances some teachers have found their salaries INCREASE upon retirement.
I suspect it is nigh-impossible to find a better location than Ontario to teach in North America. I seriously considered teaching for a long period of time, but ultimately rejected the career choice due to the personal stagnation that would be inflicted upon me by the union rules.
PS I know of several PhD professors from UofT who retired from the university to become high school teachers -- equivalent pay, better benefits, fewer hours. Only detriment was less notoriety.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"