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68% of UK Universities and Colleges Use Firefox

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the british-insight dept.

An anonymous reader writes "mozillaZine is reporting that over two-thirds of British universities and colleges have installed Mozilla or Firefox on their campus computers. They cite an open source survey by OSS Watch that also shows rising support for Mozilla Thunderbird, Moodle and Octave, though a decline for OpenOffice and LaTeX. Predictably, all open source offerings are blown away by Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office's 100% deployment rates."

3 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Re:If OSS can conquer Universities... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Right on. It's depressing to hear that LaTeX use is declining. I wrote my thesis using LaTeX and it was such an easy process once I learned the syntax. It was so nice not to have autoformat screwing things up all the time. Equations looked really good, too!

  2. Re:WTH? Moodle and Octave? by jd · · Score: 3, Informative
    Octave is an Open Source program for maths and mathematical graphics. It is comparable to Matlab or Mathematica. It has been out for almost two decades. I wouldn't be surprised if early versions were scrawled on the walls of caves by stone-age cultures. As a result, it has a very strong following, albeit of mathematicians in strange flowing robes. The programming language is a mix of C, LISP and medieval Latin. Having said that, it is very, very good.


    Moodle is a course management system. What a University would want with one of those, I don't know. Half of my lecturers never turned up on time and one simply photocopied the course textbook as notes and read from it during lectures. Even those I had some respect for (one was a Dr. Who fan) were hopelessly disorganized and seemed to prefer it that way.


    Now, I am a little surprised they said more about LaTeX (which is in decline because the friggin' developers aren't developing! I've never seen people drag their feet so much) than they did about Open Groupware (an Open Source Exchange replacement that is very respectable), Beowulf/Mosix/OpenMosix/Kerrighn (which turns a barely-used lab into a giant supercomputer wihout stupid license modifications), or ReLaTe (an Open Source videoconferencing + whiteboard suite developed by the University College of London for remote teaching).


    There is a LOT of aspects to Open Source I would love to know if/how the Universities are aware of. I happen to think LaTeX is superb and wish Firefox would parse the markup, but I don't think it's an area of Open Source that schools, colleges or Universities need to focus on. What I do want to know is what they ARE focussing on and what they DAMN WELL SHOULD focus on.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  3. Re:If OSS can conquer Universities... by Noksagt · · Score: 4, Informative
    And that's the problem right there. You have to learn, and read, the syntax yourself.
    There are "WYSIWYM" editors for LaTeX, as well as programs which help you write it. I agree that the learning curve is what prevents adoption, but it isn't an insurmountable barrier. Another barrier is the added time of processing the document
    That's a lot of work for just marking up documents, especially since Word or WordPerfect can do a decent job with a lot less of a learning curve.
    WYSIWYG line optimization doesn't look as good as page optimization. These formats are quite fragile & don't look the same when rendered by other installations of the software & sometimes other installations won't even be able to open them. Furthermore, there is a learning curve involved in using these "properly" (with styles & contents generation). This might be fine for short documents, but these don't scale well.
    LaTeX makes some sense if you are doing lots of documents professionally
    Or even a single, complex document (such as a thesis).
    but for someone who's likely to only write a handful of papers it's overkill.
    Depends on what is happening with those papers. Many journals now strip away all formatting & so it doesn't matter if you give them a Word Doc or a LaTeX article--the two should look nearly the same in print. Sometimes, the author is burdened with making sure everything looks fantastic & a minimal amount of time can be spent to make a document that DOES look better. Some journals will only take DOC or only take LaTeX, which decides the format you should use. LaTeX still has a place in academia.