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 ;)"

Comments

Backstory

[mfh]

I think this move is the most enlightened move the Ministry of Ed has made since inception. Sadly it's only motivated by the shoddy budget for education, and not a move in ideology, necessarily. The backstory to the Ontario Ministry of Education using Star Office has to do mostly with politics. Even with $2bil increase to spending on education in the 2004 budget, this is still a lot less than years prior, due to Tory cuts to education. It's really a sad state of affairs for children today, in Ontario.

Re:Backstory

[Orgazmus]

In our school(Norway), we have about 60pc's running licenced versions of WinXP, while we're out of everything else :\
Its sad..

Re:Backstory

[tftp]

Spare me the "Oh they made a monopoly out of nothing and then put a gun to millions of people's heads" theories

I'd use a different analogy: "MS gave users enough of their drugs so that the users are addicted now, and can't withdraw even when they are ravaged by some virus every other day."

There is nothing wrong in curing a drug addict (assuming that it is possible.) Similarly, there is nothing wrong in weaning the users from the MS alcohol, even though it tastes great.

Re:Backstory

[nathanh]

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.

I'm no lover of Microsoft either but there's no denying that some of their products are quite good. Microsoft haters need to realise that Microsoft makes stuff that is "good enough". It isn't always the best but similarly it isn't always the worst.

Of course, this "good enough" mentality in customers is what will destroy Microsoft. Free software like Linux is also "good enough". So Microsoft might invest considerable effort to make their products better but the vast majority of customers just won't care. Superior quality didn't save Microsoft's competitors in the 80s and 90s and it won't save Microsoft now.

However, I will make a point that Microsoft got this large mostly through luck. They owned the popular OS which ran on the hardware platform that grew from the expected run of several 1000 IBM units to several 100 million cloned units worldwide. That success could have just as equally gone to Apple if the Apple II was a clonable platform, or to Digital Research if the Kildalls hadn't balked at IBM's NDA. Mr Gates was in the right place at the right time and knew someone willing to sell him the right product. You might call that "business genius" but honestly I think Gates isn't that smart. He might have had some inkling the deal with IBM was "important" but I doubt he realised it was worth tens of billions.

Re:Backstory

[Daengbo]

What's really sad about this is that normally it's not the case. The K12LTSP mailing list is full of members pitching a thin client system to underfunded districts, saying that they can reuse all the machines currently in the school and accept donations from parents, while spending a relatively small sum on a couple of high quality servers.

The overwhelming majority choose to totally upgrade their IT structure on MS's timetable while slashing teaching positions, instead.

Some people don't have their priorities straight.

Re:Hosers

[Champion3]

At least it will flag any occurances of "y'all."

Cost?

[LinuxInDallas]

Interesting that the Canadian government can choose not to disclose the money spent on the contract. That's definitely in contrast to here in the US where even a teacher's pay is public record.

Re:Fools!

[sasha328]

And who would you have look after re-training required?
Sun also has included some forms of training (and training for teachers as well)
There's a story at ITBusiness.ca that has more information.

In all seriousness...

[Trillan]

A few years ago, I added a spell checker to an application I wrote. I tried to find a Canadian English wordlist, either complete or as a supplement to a British or American dictionary.

It's very difficult to find. I eventually concluded I was going to have to contact some Canadian publishers, and around that time I decided not to bother.

Presumably, other Canadians did what I did -- use the American dictionary and correct it from time to time.

Re:Canadian English

[Zagadka]

Actually, the Pop vs Soda thing isn't Canadian vs American. Take a look at this map, which shows which term is predominantly used in each part of the US and Canada.

The biggest differences between American and Canadian English that I know of have to do with spelling. eg: colour vs color, metre vs meter, etc. The only differences I've noticed in spoken English are zed vs zee thing, and the nonsensical way Americans use "quarter of" when referring to the time. (to me "quarter of 12" is 3, but to Americans it apparently means "a quarter to 12")

Re:Hosers

[sommerfeld]

It's real. Vowels tend to wander in regional dialects so what sounds like an "au" to you might sound closer to an "oo" to me. Google turned up "Canadian Raising" which explains this particular difference better than I can.

Re:Need OO.o to MS filters

[aled]

And a standalone viewer would be cool. MS used to have standalones viewers for office, don't know now. Perhaps a simple app that xsl openoffice to rtf to open with wordpad would not be difficult.

Re:Need OO.o to MS filters

[bstadil]

If you use RTF you play MS' game as you will most likely get a .doc file back. I want to send myfile.sxw and have the MS folks screw around with the filters.

Re:Is this such a great idea...?

[BCW2]

They will also be proficient at Open Office and it is comming soon to business near you. There are at least two furniture makers that have switched to OO 1.1 in the last year. They don't want to pay the M$ tax any more. They are also looking hard at Linux for the next time they purchase new computers. Some of the smaller ones have switched too.

More businesses are heading that way, they don't need the expense of M$. They don't see any benifit in paying for Office. Functional and cheap are getting more important.

Re:Need OO.o to MS filters

[mrchaotica]

While I sympathize with your desire to punish MS users, they have to really want to read your document for that to work.

Maybe you should get a big stack of mini-CDRs (or business card size ones) and give them a copy of OpenOffice with every document!

Parochial school boards

[Jardine]

For those who may be confused as to why the Ministry of Education is signing deals for parochial school boards, Ontario has two seperate publicly funded education systems.

There's what is now called the public system (used to be the Protestant system) and the Catholic system. Technically the Canadian constitution has a similar freedom of religion clause to the one in the US constitution which would prevent a publicly funded religious school system but the Ontario constitution also has a clause that allows for one. So we get two sets of school boards. Great fun.

Re:Parochial school boards

[JohnnyCannuk]

Uhmmm, not quite, but close.

Firstly, you've got things WAY out of whack.

First of all our public school system in Ontario is NOT and old protestant system. It has always been a public school system. It was created by Egerton Ryerson (name-sake for Ryerson University in Toronto) in the early 1840s, after the Rebellion of 1837. This public school system was created as part of the reforms brought in by Lafontaine and Baldwin to address the causes of the rebellion.

So the public school system in Ontario is actually older than Canada itself. Religious schools did not recieve government funding.

But during the negotiations for Confederation in 1867, Ontario (predominantly Protestant) agreed to publicly fund a Catholic school system and Quebec (predominantly Catholic) agreed to fund a separate Protestant system. These systems existance were and still are part of our constitution - the British North America Act (1867) (and now the Canada Act 1982). The only issues we have had have been around funding - Ontario would only fund the Catholic system up to grade 10 until 1984, when it funded it fully.

Now, the section of the Contitution dealing with freedom of religion and separation of church and state was added as part of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. So the original requirement for funded religious schools is still there until challenged by someone who will take it to the Supreme Court.

One would think it would be easy to get rid of it, since Quebec no longer has Protestant schools - it now has public English and French systems. Even in Quebec, religious schools such as the Catholics must pay for their schools themselves.

Now, as a father of two children of school age, I agree that our province should not be funding both a Catholic and Public system, both on the basis of expense AND on the basis that it give special status to the Catholic religion that no other religion enjoys (and no religion should enjoy special status). I'm quite sure this violates the separation of church and state, but the ability to challenge it has only been around for about 22 years. And the Catholics have a lot of votes in this province. Also, our Charter has specific provisions that state that it applies to the laws of Canada but not to the other sections of the Contitution itself, so even if it is declared in violation of the charter, the charter may not appply to the section of the old British North America Act that deal with this. It may actually take a contitutional amendmant to fix it (and we all know haow easy THAT is).

So I agree that it is an idiotic system and we should put all of our money into a single, excellent public shcool system with no religious affiliations, but your simplistic explaination of it is just wrong. You need to see it in it's context to see how really silly it is.

Re:And the point is

[Zro Point Two]

I've actually started sending my resume in plain text format...and have had a few more callbacks than I normally would have gotten. Not just the initial ones, but since companies use OCR to scan resumes to plain text and then put them into a database, they can get messed up, and therefore, miss your resume when searching later. With the plain text, it goes in exactly how you want it.

I just state in my email that I'm sending the resume in plain text to avoid software version confusion, software vendor confusion, and virus prevention (obviously worded a bit differently).

It also doesn't hurt that there have been quite a few macro viruses throughout the years, and people are more likely to open a .txt file.

And the final benefit to me sending it in plain text is that even though I normally use Windows, I do try out various flavors of linux here and there, and I can ALWAYS pull up my most recently edited resume, edit it, and save it, knowing that I'll be able to open it again in Linux/Windows without having to install OO/MSO.

Picking on Canada?

[gwoodrow]

What can be said about this article but bravo? Whatever the reason may be - whether motivated by money or otherwise - it's a good choice. Anyone who works in the tech industry knows that the people who usually handle money and decisions regarding computing are usually clueless. Far too often they just throw money at Dell or Gateway and say "Send us school stuff." This indicates that there was actual research done and is a good sign that administrators may actually be catching up with the technology.

On a side note, I must remark on all the Canada jokes. I myself am not Canadian, nor have I ever been there - but I find the jokes rather tired. Considering most of us that will be reading this spend our spare time INDOORS on COMPUTER TERMINALS while using terms like l33t and w00t!, I think we lack the necessary leverage to effectively make fun of any country or native persons of said country. Yes, that includes Canada. America Junior has just as much of a right to respect as we geeks do. Pocket protector jokes are just as tired for me as 'aboot' is for them, I'm sure.

I guess people like to pay

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, why do they need to buy or license star office when Open office is FREE - yep, they can download it for _FREE_ as in no cash, no mula, nada.

Maybe that's why Microsoft is making so much money, because they charge an arm and a leg. Yep - since it is expensive, it must be _GOOD_

Question...

[16K Ram Pack]

When you send people the link to download OOo, what's their reaction?

How about sending the file in PDF format?

XML will be an option ?

[foobsr]

Not really yet ready though.

Generating Word documents using XSLT

Thinking XML

Opening Open Formats with XSLT

Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas Overview

Why You Should Choose MS Office Over OO.org

Why not complicate a complicated world a little more. Each standard unit of complication renders X standard monetary units in someones pockets.

CC.

Corel is the Loser in this Deal

[frank249]

For many years the Ontario Teacher's pension fund was a major investor in Corel and Corel basically offered WordPerfect for free to Ontario schools. When Corel was stolen by Vector the pension fund lost over $500 mil. Now with no reason for a special relationship and with the WordPerfect - Student/Teacher version costing $99 and it makes sense that the Board of Education would look for a better deal. Bill Gates and Vector(owners of Corel) probally thought this would force the schools over to MS Office but in this case it back fired on them.

Our situation

[wirehead78]

I am the sysadmin for a private, non-profit k-12 in upstate NY. We operate on a shoestring budget. This year we spent thousdands of dollars to license Office 2000 for about 50 computers. I had mentioned to the Principal about using OpenOffice or some other open source suite, which would obviously be free. He was concerned that in the "real world" people use MS Office and the students would have a hard time working between different versions. Also the same problem currently existed because many of the students had MS Office at home. So the idea was shot down after only a few seconds. I didn't know how to convince him otherwise.

Re:Open Source and Green Party

[Idarubicin]

Expect to see more such moves if the Green Party of Canada comes to power in this month's federal election.

Well, that's an interesting remark on several levels.

Education policy is in the purview of the provinces, not the federal government. It's a right that the provinces have historically jealously guarded; they would probably defy such suggestions from the feds just as a matter of principle.

'If' the Green Party comes to power? Nationally, they have less than 10% support. As the parent notes, they're not coming to power. If a minority government is elected, they might hold some swing votes in a coalition government.

In Ontario, it was a provincial Liberal government that adopted StarOffice. Based on this precedent, it could be argued that one should vote Liberal for more such moves....

Costs To Schools = Zero

[SoVi3t]

Well, almost. My father worked for the Board of Education about a decade ago, give or take, and when a move was made for C++ to be used instead of QBASIC (yes, that was how bad our education system was), Microsoft made the offer of "it's free for you to use, and no licensing fees....as long as nothing ever gets released." So basically if anybody wanted to make something and then release it (a game, an app, etc), they had to consult with MS first.