68% of UK Universities and Colleges Use Firefox

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."

Comments

If OSS can conquer Universities...

[sweetnjguy29]

...then the rest of the world shall follow! These numbers are deceiving though, because although more than two thirds of UK universities and colleges have it installed, it is only installed on "some" of their hardware. It is depressing that the open source model and philosophy hasn't caught on with more force in universities, especially since it fits so well with many universities mission statements, to bring education and enlightenment to the masses.

Re:If OSS can conquer Universities...

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:If OSS can conquer Universities...

[Noksagt]

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.

Missed Advertising Opportunities

[SlashdotOgre]

It's good to hear Firefox use is increasing, but it has always frustrated me how many people have never even heard of OpenOffice.org. While I was working at a university last year a few times I had to pick up some cables from the bookstore, and on two occasions the person behind me in line was planning to buy MS Office. In both cases I suggested OO.o -- something the person had never heard of -- and in both cases the person decided to post pone purchasing MS Office until after they try Open Office. Since it's free, I've found most people are willing to at least give it a shot; however it amazed me that I've never seen OO.o advertised in a campus bookstore. You would think that a university campus, full of students who could use that extra hundreds of dollars saved from not buying MSO more than most people, would be a perfect place to push Open Office.

Re:Missed Advertising Opportunities

[CastrTroy]

The university book store is a business just like any other. Their only interest is in making money. Most of the time it isn't run by the school, or the student union, but rather by some company who has been given an exclusive contract to sell books on campus. Where I went to school the student union had opened their own book store, because students were tired of high priced books, and no competition. However, the books were usually only 1 or 2 dollars cheaper, and they didn't carry all the books. This may be something you want to have your student union pushing to inform the students.

Re:Installed != Used

[arachnoprobe]

but: installed = usable = choice = better

Re:disappointing numbers

[LindseyJ]

We defiantly have a long way to go to catch up to their European counterparts.

Indeed...

Re:WTH? Moodle and Octave?

[jd]

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.