OSSDI to Distribute OpenOffice.org in Schools

Xampper writes to tell us that the OSSDI (Open Source Software Distribution Initiative) is a new organization that has cropped up to help not only spread the word about Open Source Software, but to help distribute the OpenOffice.org office suite starting with less fortunate school districts. The OSSDI describes their current status as still being in its "infancy as an organization. Because of this, all of our current resources are focused on gaining supporters, raising funds, and recruiting volunteers. Plans are under-way for our first software distribution, but we must first cover our operating costs. We are also interested in becoming a registered not for profit corporation so that donors will receive tax breaks for their gifts, but the registration process can also be very costly and time-consuming."

Comments

Oy.

[Xampper]

The timing of this post hit me just as I was migrating our email services to Google Hosted Services. If you email OSSDI and get a bounce, try again in an hour. Sorry about the trouble!

OLPC Software

[caitriona81]

I wonder if the same can be done for distributing OLPC's software platform easily. If a large part of the cost of computers in schools is the software and the continual upgrades that come with it, wonder what can be done for schools that already have computers, just not the latest and greatest...

less fortunate school districts?

[usv]

As in those currently having only MS software?

Come back when you've grown up

[Harmonious Botch]

Ok, your heart is in the right place, but you seem a bit unprepared. I mean, if you can't cope with the bureaucracy of registering as a non-profit, how are you going to cope with the bureaucracy of school management?

Re:Come back when you've grown up

[garcia]

I mean, if you can't cope with the bureaucracy of registering as a non-profit, how are you going to cope with the bureaucracy of school management?

What's the difference if they do that or not? I'd rather have them be an unregistered social club that gets the job done than worry about being registered as a non-profit.

Unless they are looking to avoid paying taxes and sales taxes, there shouldn't be a real need for that anyway.

Re:Come back when you've grown up

[ortholattice]

I mean, if you can't cope with the bureaucracy of registering as a non-profit, how are you going to cope with the bureaucracy of school management?

I briefly looked into (and gave up) applying for non-profit status for an open-source project - the main reason being so that people could deduct donations on their tax forms - and found out that it can be a real pain that distracts from your goals. After all, it dips into Uncle Sam's (in the U.S.) revenue, so they aren't motivated to make the approval and appeal process simple. And it isn't free, either, although the fees (was it $135/yr?) aren't too unreasonable. Most organizations have their lawyers set the thing up, although it can be done without a lawyer if you're willing to do the requirements research and paperwork.

An alternative that I started to investigate, that is apparently much easier, was to seek what's called "fiscal sponsorship" from another organization that already has an approved U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. There are very strict rules about the nature of financial transactions that can take place between the two entities, but the basic idea is that donations are made to the sponsoring entity, which then decides to fund the subsidiary according to what they perceive it needs. The main advantages are that donations are tax-deductible and donors supposedly have some assurance that their funds aren't personally enriching the donee instead of being used for the project. (I didn't complete the process of setting this up for other reasons, though, so that's all I know about it.) Anyway, that's what I would recommend that the story submitter look into.

Re:Distribution on CD?

[Xampper]

Just because a school has resources to download the software doesn't mean they will. They're much more likely to try it out if they have the CD sitting in front of them. Also, we're targeting the students more than the schools themselves, the schools are just a vehicle for distribution.

Re:Yay first post... :)

[lcsjk]

I hate to have to tell you this, but based on your grammar and spelling, getting used to legal terminology should not be your first priority.

Will this be OpenOffice for Windows?

[popo]

Because there's something very strange about providing a free office suite that runs on an expensive OS.

Why not distribute a Linux distro bundled with OOo?

Otherwise the overall mission seems compromised by the platform.

Re:Will this be OpenOffice for Windows?

[BecomingLumberg]

Because currently, you can distribute a Linux distro to the small percentage of people interested in running linux. You can give away OO.o to almost anyone with a computer, and they can use it. Plus, there are many students in college that must use windows for one reason or another, or are scared to switch. This will be an introduction for the time being with maybe a conversion down the line.

Why just Open Office?

[planetmn]

I like the idea. Though it certainly is not going to be easy to find districts willing to install and support the software on their own if they don't have experience with it.

But why just Open Office? Why not do something with (or like) Edubuntu, and distribute an entire platform that has the administration and management tools built in? People are definately hesitent to change, but if they are going to learn something new (in this case Open Office), it might be a good time for them to jump right in (especially if you, or a group of local volunteers can spend time training them).

-dave

Re:Distribution on CD?

[nharmon]

Also, we're targeting the students more than the schools themselves, the schools are just a vehicle for distribution.

For a minute there I forgot we were talking about OO.org CDs, and not drugs.

Re:No names

[Xampper]

I am the founder. My full name is George Johnson. Right now, the board members have not been finalized. They will be withing the next few days.

Re:Distribution on CD?

[lcsjk]

Give a person a CD and they will probably give it a try. Tell them that there is a nifty program on a website somewhere that they can download, burn to a CD and they will walk away and do it when they have time, which is never.

Have you ever wondered why AOL sent so many CDs instead of telling people that the program is on the internet?

Re:Distribution on CD?

[popo]

So the goal of the non-profit is *not* to provide access to a cost-saving alternative, but to overcome the inherent laziness and stupidity of American educators and school systems. Ok. I just wanted to make sure I had that straight.

Re:Distribution on CD?

[Lord_Slepnir]

"Psssst.... want some Open Office?"
"I don't know. My dad says to stay with Microsoft Office"
"Come on! It's free!"
"But at school, they said that OpenOffice is a gateway program, and that I'll soon be hitting the heavy stuff like Linux"
"This ain't linux! What's wrong with just trying just a little bit of OpenOffice"
"But my friend Jimmy started on just a little bit of OpenOffice, now he spends all of his time trolling forums and posting in Vi vs. Emacs threads. I wanted to play some Quake with him last night, and he said that he was too busy rebuilding his Gentoo system from Stage 1 with some really cool flags some guy gave him on the internet." *Starts Crying* "I don't want strange guys on the internet giving me flags!"
"what are you, some kind of wimp?"
"I'm going to walk away now. Friends don't let friends use Open Source"

This message brought to you by Open Source Abuse Resistance Education. Just say no to Open Source

Training costs, or, "why change is always bad."

[Kadin2048]

I suspect that an even larger part of school's budgets than software, are the salaries of the people who are responsible for maintaining everything; IT-types but also teachers, librarians, etc.

Those are the people who need to be "sold" on Linux or even other OSS projects like OO.org; in my experience it's a lot easier to get management on board with a solid presentation highlighting the cost savings and feature parity, but it can be quickly scuttled by the rank-and-file if they're resistant to change.

A few days ago I read another post that I think highlighted the problem. The major impediment to any sort of even slightly radical IT change, is the huge number of users who do not understand computers, or the technology they use on a daily basis. At best, they've been trained to complete certain tasks, but there's no more understanding of what's going on there, than a rat understands what goes on outside its cage when it presses on the food pedal. Do this, this happens; there's no conceptual grasp of the process, just of the procedure. This is a huge stumbling block, because it turns what someone who understands the system perceives as a trivial change, into a major one, with massive retraining costs. Something as simple as changing some menus or the "look and feel" of a dialog box can send 'trained' users back to management, demanding retraining on the new software.

I've worked on some big software projects for government users, and there have been times when entire systems have been gutted and rebuilt, but the one thing that absolutely, positively, could not change, no matter what were the user interfaces. Ripping out all the infrastructure behind the scenes was a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of sending all the users to retraining courses, which is what they would demand if they noticed anything different. (In reality, this was mostly an excuse to demand a paid psuedo-vacation; travel on an expense account to someplace where they could sit around in a classroom and space out for a few days. But that's the way it works.)

Concentrating on the 'top down' and costs savings will only get you so far. Unfortunately, people at the bottom are going to resist any change at all, unless you can figure out a way to paint it so that it's to their personal advantage.

Re:Training costs, or, "why change is always bad."

[Monsuco]

but it can be quickly scuttled by the rank-and-file if they're resistant to change.

My dad works for school districts. He said back in the early 1990's teachers were furious that they were told they had to use this new fangled e-mail instead of network mail. All of the teachers were complaining about how complicated this new e-mail would be. They wanted their network mail. Finally, after some heavy pushing from the district, they submitted to this horribly complex e-mail. Now they obviously could never go back. Change can happen even when people don't want it to.

Re:Training costs, or, "why change is always bad."

[Machtyn]

unless you can figure out a way to paint it so that it's to their personal advantage.
The biggest personal advantage one can give a novice:
"You don't have to spend $250.00 on MS Office 200x of your own money to use the formats that we will use at the school. Here, take this disk, or here let me put this install file on your USB drive... double click on that and off you go."

(Sure, they get the educational edition... it's only $120.00 at Amazon. Many teachers have to work an entire day to take home that much pay. An average of $50k/yr /(12*4*40) hourly wage * .80 take home after taxes = ~$21.00 of take home pay/hour.)

Re:Distribution on CD?

[dkf]

Have you ever wondered why AOL sent so many CDs instead of telling people that the program is on the internet?

I always assumed it was because they thought I didn't have enough mats for standing hot drinks on.

Re:If Only...

[Chandon Seldon]

The very simple fact is that you don't need Word, Access, Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel or any clones of them to accomplish any legitimate work. Heavyweight word processors are seriously overkill for most tasks they're used for, and not well equipped for more complex tasks like document processing and desktop publishing. I'm still not sure what the niche for Access is supposed to be; either you're a programmer and need a scripting language and SQLite or you're not and need to hire one. Outlook is sort of bloated for an email client, and I'd probably lean towards webapp for a calendaring / scheduling tool. Powerpoint is neat, but I see it abused far more than it's legitimately used. Excel is the most legitimate app of the bunch - the ability to do light number-crunching as a non-programmer is useful; on the other hand, like Word, Excel trys to stretch beyond that niche and people end up using it with data sets that deserve something a little bit more robust.

In conclusion, most people would be better served by lighter weight or domain specific applications, and it's only the massive marketing push towards "Office Suites" on the 90's that's stuck us with Microsoft Office and Open Office. It'd be nice if people realized that, and it would be even nicer if people stopped getting automatically trained on this crap.

Re:No names

[Xampper]

Great suggestions. I don't know if you'll see this reply, but if so, contact me at [george at OSSDI's domain]. Thanks.

Re:and when no district can turn down a FREE offer

[ElleyKitten]

MSFT will go out of business and the OSSFS movement will have an effective monopoly on office software.

However, with the default file format of OpenOffice being an open file format that anyone can use that will mean that if OO ever becomes the most common office suite then other office suites can still easily compete because they can implement the same file format everyone uses with OO, instead of the way it is now where competing office suites have to scrap to attempt to emulate a closed format. Right now, OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, Google Docs and SS and others all read ODF, so there's no way for them to lock each other out of the market like MS Office has locked most other office suites out. It's also not like MS Office would have to die if OO gained marketshare. MS could implement ODF into Office, and then put in features people want at a price they're willing to pay (you can't tell me that businesses wouldn't pay for a professional product done right instead of hoping some free download will meet their needs). Then, it's just like regular competition. Been a long time since we've seen that in office software.