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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 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.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
It's about time some major organization, even a non-profit, started using StarOffice, or OOo.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
'Canadian English'?
Will StarOffice append '", eh?" to every sentence? Or does it simply replace "about" with "aboot"?
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
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.
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.
But they want the SUPPORT that comes with StarOffice.
Corel had a huge deal with the Ontario Board of Education a few years back, to get WordPerfect onto every computer. They got it installed... but nobody used it. The Microsoft hold was too strong by then. And this was like 2000. I don't think this had changed...
I recall talking to the "computer" teacher/sysadmin at the time, suggesting WordPerfect or StarDivison's Staroffice on the additional Word licenses the school held. His answer was basically "but nobody will use it." Educators after all aren't accountable for costs like private businesses would be.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
Just because I'm bored I'll post some canadian-american english translations
American - Canadian
Soda - Pop
11th Grade- Grade 11
well thats all i can think of, that sure killed 2 minutes
I know as a fact, that computer systems in schools cost a huge amount of dollars (buying licenses for hundreds of computers at a time). I think the move to open source for schools will reduce the amount of prices associated with computers and allow for that money saved to be put towards something other than software (like gym equipment, or something more useful). When they move to open source operating systems, that will dramatically decrease problems associated with Windows (as there are right now)...
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.
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.
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.
I would be much better if you could suggest a filter that they could use within MS Office to read and write OO.o files directly.
Once OO.o reaches a 15%-20% marketshare, the battle is won as you can then demand they read your files not that they need to be "translated"
Help fight continental drift.
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.
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.
Microsoft is not going to let this happen, and I think I know what they will do. First, drastic price cuts will be implemented followed by the creation of additional tools and resources for schools and teachers.
The reason Microsoft will refuse to give in, even if it means that they might lose a load of money in the short run, is because they understand that if they can get students hooked while they are young, they can keep perpetuating a monopoly. My younger siblings want Microsoft Word/Powerpoint/Excel on their computer/laptop simply because they know it from school.
It will be a tough fight if larger inroads are made, because Microsoft will certainly retaliate. Another problem is schools are still able to opt for Microsoft Office instead, which many of them will certainly do.
It is not "Canadian English", it is "The Queen's English" that pretty much every other English-speaking country other than the US uses.
I hate sigs.
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.
Given the tortured grammar of that sentence, Canada feels no loss.
I drove west across the Trans-Canada Highway in '98 on my slightly roundabout way to California, and there was a definite patch of people saying "aboot" in Western Ontario. It was a long time ago now, but I think it was mostly between Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay.
Its for schools. They havn't been trained at all yet.
Get em while they're young :)
Our school district uses OO, and we don't burn CD's. That's what network shares are for. For unconnected machines, sure - you can use a CD - we techs have them. A user could burn a copy if needed.
It's easier to network-install 3-5 copies rather than popping CD's in and out anyhow, and I'd imagine most PC's are not standalone these days.
I mean, maybe you don't want to work for a company with such policies anyway, but often HR is quite separate from where you'll actually be working... if you get the job.
Not that I have real world experience, being a professional student at this point. I'm just pessimistic and cynical when it comes to cracking the MS stranglehold.
Windows free since 2000
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
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
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.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
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.
Anybody remeber the "Logo" computer that was developed by the Ontario Ministry of Education. In the eary PC days. (No, I don't mean the Logo language.)
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.
.txt file.
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
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.
Zro . two
"I come from Canada...they say I'm slow....eh?"
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.
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.
Yeah, why should teachers be paid more than plumbers? They only take care of our children, not toilets, which everyone knows are more important.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
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_
OfficeStar assistance can help you. What is the letter aboot? ____________________________________ ( OK ) ( Cancel )
I wonder if they have same kind of a setup than in my school where both M$ Office and StarOffice are installed. Microsoft provides very cheap school agreements so there isn't a big incentive to choose only StarOffice. And guess which one of the office suites is used primarily in my school.
... 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!
How about sending the file in PDF format?
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.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
You can download the Canadian English (or even NZ or Australian English) spellchecker dictionary for OpenOffice / Star Office from this location.
Dictionaries for several dozen other languages are also available. Includes some that probably aren't available for MS Word - Moari, Faroese, Setswana, Zulu, etc.
Ideology is for ideots.
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.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
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.
Not only does Ontario have a multitude of high schools...they also have several world-class Universities. University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, Queens, and McMaster are just naming a few. I myself go to U of Waterloo and I know that in our engineering labs we're given the choice of using either OpenOffice or MS Office (forced to use OpenOffice in some of the lower budget labs). Now who attends Ontario Universities? Ontario students! If these students develop a preference for Star/OpenOffice, it's likely that you'll start to see MS Word disappear from our institutions of higher learning. Once you have everyone familiar with StarOffice and Netscape 7.x (it's offered as an alternative to IE on all school machines, despite the fact it's clunky as sin), a full switch to a Linux-based environment is just a hop, skip and a jump away. Now if only some of the more specializing companies made linux ports of their software.
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.
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
The Dallas Independent School District, serving Dallas, Texas, has had a site licence for Star Office for more than a year now. [From 1999-2000 stats] there are more than 200 schools in the district servering more than 150,000 students (here and here)
They obtained the licence for the purpose of distributing it on the laptops they supplied their teachers (1,000+). I heard a figure on how much it cost, but it was not from an authoritive source. If the figure is true, then the savings over MS Office was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (read: > $500,000.00+).
Star Office is a wise move for any public institution spending tax-payer monies.
Been there and done that my friend. Here's the reasons I put forth:
.DOC is hardly a 'standard' just ask anyone whose tried to convert old 'Works' documents.
1) Take a look through history - that's the 'real world'. Has it ALWAYS been MS Windows Office? I'll bet not. In fact, I'll bet it's been Wordperfect for DOS and Windows, Xywrite, Word for DOS and Windows, etc. The fact is that computer software evolves quickly, and your principal needs to get over it.
First and foremost, educational facilities shouldn't be pushing a particular brand 'X' software either, particularly from a company convicted of monopolistic practices. Most of what needs to be done in OOo is completely translatable to Word or Wordperfect with minimal effort.
2) Everyone DOES NOT have MS Office at home. That's a crock. What versions might they have - it matters. Do you realize that many people buying a Dell now are getting Wordperfect as a default office suite? What about older, incompatible versions of MS Office?
3) Win over the STAFF and get it in their homes. Let the staff see OOo in operation. Find out what their objections are (there will be some). Eliminate the unrealistic ones. Point out the advantages (they get a free copy, PDF/Flash support, etc.)
4) OOo or StarOffice is great and has been terrific for us because of standardization. Every student, teacher, and staff member uses it and guess what? Everything just works. No document incompatibilities because one document was formatted for someone else's printer. No issues with international characters. No licensing issues.
5) Which staff member was willing to take a pay cut to help finance Microsoft? That's the question I posed and what it was coming down to at the time. We were really in serious straights three years ago financially and things were tight. Money ended up being a prime motivator, but the software has proven itself over time.
Feel free to shoot me an email if you'd like to discuss this further. I'm also the tech coordinator of a small all-girls private school here in PA. We converted to StarOffice/OOo three years ago and haven't looked back.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Why become a teacher if you don't get payed well? Up here, in vancouver, thanks to unions, you can get payed just as much to be the shcool janitor AND you save yourself 5 years in college. This of course is two sperate problems rolled into one (skilled workers getting payed to little, unskilled workers getting payed to much) but it essentially means that, you are better off not getting a degree and working as a care aid or janitor, OR getting a degree in a trade or business. So why would you teach? The only people who go into teaching now are idealists who want to make the world a better place and it isn't long before they become jaded by the school system.
We need to give teachers a salary proportional to the work and skill that was required to get the job not just to keep them happy but to attract a wider range of candidates
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
You realize there are more than two parties you know.
I am pissed off at the Liberals too, but I am defiantly not going to help voting in a homo-phobic, anti-abortion right-wing wacko. I am voting NDP. And I would strongly urge any Canadian who values civil rights to do the same.