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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 ;)"
I was in high school and university in Ontario during the Tory regime. They are the best thing that even happened to public education in Ontario. The amount of corruption and waste that was left behind by the NDP was grotesque, the Tories were just cleaning that up.
There was insane waste in IT budget; we had teachers take school computers home for personal use and only bring them back when something better was bought so they'd take the better one and return the obsolete one. We had textbook shortages that the teachers would solve by photocopying class sets of textbooks every year, at a much higher cost than just buying books would be.
Cutting the budget forces the corruption to shrink so it doesn't get discovered.
The last I heard though, they still had to buy things from blessed companies that charged 3 times as much.