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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 ;)"
Why not get support for very little money. Sun has such a low cost per seat that there would have been no point to using OOo instead of SO. Perhaps you would like to see development in OOo slow down, because if SO does not make Sun money, that's exactly what will happen.
But they want the SUPPORT that comes with StarOffice.
Well it is somewhere, the problem is that no one cares to look for it unless the money is declared missing by the opposition party. I believe on a whole we trust our government a slight bit more, until that it is it's brought to our attention. Good thing there is a federal election here on June 28th, god willing a minority liberal government will be in control.
PS for Canadian Slashdot'ers: Voting is as easy as ABC, Anybody But Conservative
Happy Noodle Boy says "F###ing doughnut! Mock me? You fried cyclops!!"
Before everyone starts complaining about why they didn't use a free alternative like OOo, look at the Star Office 7 link in the summary. It IS free for educational use:
Education No license fees; cost of media and shipping
It was probably cheaper than trying to burn and distrubute thousands and thousands of OOo CDs, since most schools don't have CD burners available that would be able to produce a quantity like that. They bulk of the 'minimal' amount of money probably went to a support contract.
Those formats were all designed for interchange. Both doc and oo.o files were designed primarily to be used with their respective Wordprocessors. It's following MS's paradigm to send wordprocessing files when a much simpler format does the job without a special plugin.
"The bottom line is, the sooner we can de-indoctrinate (is that a word?) people from Microsoft products, and in greater amounts, the sooner they will go away."
Oh brother. So your motivation is "destroy Microsoft"? You just hate them, so be gone with them? +5 Insightful?
Look, I'm not exactly in love with Microsoft here, but the reason that they're in this monopoly in the first place is they have made a VERY useful app. Spare me the "Oh they made a monopoly out of nothing and then put a gun to millions of people's heads" theories, as long as people are complaining that the alternatives are missing features then the Microsoft 'doctrine' is going to remain quite strong.
It's cool that somebody took a leap and started using Open Office, but man, don't turn this into a "ding dong MS is dead" pitchfork party.
"Derp de derp."
The problem I can see for Microsoft is that once something like Open/Star Office reaches a certain point (say 20%), Microsoft could get into deep trouble. At that point, everyone will know someone who uses Star/Open Office.
The biggest challenge for Open Office isn't quality of product. It's awareness and confidence.