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New Zealand Rejects Office For Macs
An anonymous reader writes "The New Zealand Ministry of Education has declined to renew a licensing deal for MS Office on 25,000 Macintosh computers in the country's schools. The Education Minister has suggested that schools use the free alternative NeoOffice. The article quotes a school principal who pointed out that the NeoOffice website warns users to expect problems and bugs: 'That's not the sort of software we should be expecting kids in New Zealand to be using.'" Schools are free to buy their own copies of Office. A blog on the New Zealand Herald site argues that the Ministry should have paid Microsoft this time, but not renewed the deal and instead developed a transition plan to open source.
How about, expect problems and bugs with any software?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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Unfortunately the Ministry of Education has probably signed a death warrant for the adoption of an open source office package. Without planning, forethought, notice and buy-in, most projects will die on the branch. This is a poor introduction for many to open source software and will leave a sour taste.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
I wouldn't trust NeoOffice to seamlessly handle a giant shared/published spreadsheet with lots of custom macros for dozens of users across a multi-office corporate WAN. OTOH, I'd trust it without hesitation to do anything a k-12 teacher or student would need to do with it.
I've been pleasantly surprised by the speed of NeoOffice 2.1 + the latest patch.
It starts up almost immediately on a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo iMac.
Previous versions take ages to start up.
They've also improved the GUI appearance no end from the primitive OpenOffice look and feel which is stuck in the mid 90s.
This is a perfect solution for education as it will handle all educational needs without a problem, and save the education authority and schools a lot of money. This is a sound business decision for education.
If they don't want to fight it out with NeoOffice (no idea how hard that would be, I haven't used it) why not just work with AppleWorks? I assume Apple would be reasonable, since they are not the 800lb gorilla - and they have to know getting it used in Education could only help them. (Plus, they would want to keep the Macs there as well, and I'm sure someone will eventually suggest converting to all Windows PCs as a cost savings and getting Office everywhere...)
I mean, this IS education we're talking about here. Their needs should be fairly basic - if not I would be suspicious of their teaching methods. If it were up to me I would build plans on AppleWorks but also introduce students to NeoOffice. Using both would force them to develop flexibility and the ability to learn new software. It is something they will need to do for the rest of their lives.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
I don't understand why schools let themselves get enslaved by proprietary software when kids could learn a whole lot more by experimenting with different solutions to problems.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I wouldn't say that MS is lying, just not actively disclosing that fact. It's just a reality that all software has issues and bugs. Unless you've been living under a rock, you would know that MS software also has serious security issues too. It's more like two different salesmen when you ask about the fuel economy of a car. Both will quote the correct figure but one of them may disclaim that the number may not reflect real world driving conditions. Unfortunately some people will get upset with the later as it shatters their insular view of things.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It just means that ac.nz won't be buying Office Mac 2008 (or whatever the next version for Mac is) and rolling out NeoOffice on new machines. I have to admit that I'm not a big office app user but I use NeoOffice on my Macs at home and the speed and stability improvements on version 2 and the regular patching regime have made it very usable, and it will be difficult for a native port of OpenOffice to OS X to catch up. I only hope that the NZ government will see their way to giving a tenth of their licensing costs for MS Office to Neooffice.org. It might stop them worrying about money so much.
It was their "don't whine at us if you have a problem, we are only developers" disclaimer.
I don't remember it exactly but it was blunt, over the top, and probably unnecessary.
Emacs!? When I comment that OOO.org, MS Office, and NeoOffice are so feature rich that they are too complicated for kids to bother with, you come up with Emacs? Let me tell you no child of mine is using Emacs! They'll being using VI!
Wow... I wonder when the last time there has been an Emacs VI flame around here...
Seriously though my daughter puts all kinds of graphics and fonts in her schoolwork. She'd mutiny at the suggestion of Emacs, VI, or any of the other old text editors.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I think it is a good thing that they will attempt to make a switch to NeoOffice. But sadly it is for the wrong reasons!
In reality, it seems like the Education Minister is just being plain old-fashioned cheap.
If they were serious about using NeoOffice/OpenOffice, but have concerns about the stability of the software, they should consider contributing to the project. There are tons of ways an Education minister can make that happen. He could encourage the IT related universities in his country to make projects that contribute to the products. He could donate cash to the NeoOffice and/or OpenOffice teams - say a mere 5% of the money they would otherwise have spent on commercial licenses? Or he could have contracted a local software company to improve (contribute) to the software for a specified amount.
Open and free software is good. But choosing it simply because the initial price tag is low (read: nil) is a bad motivation - especially for an Education Minister. And it doesen't really help the product or the community either.
An Open Source product is only as strong as its ACTIVE contributors.
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
I think you mean "you can't win with people". In any sufficiently large population, there's going to be a few people who are dramatically more predisposed to griping and/or are dramatically less adaptive to change than the average person. So if it's any consolation, you'd have had to deal with the same idiots no matter what industry you worked in ;-)
Read my blog.
I think you mean "you can't win with people".
Obviously you have never worked in a school with teachers. The easiest way to describe it is a dysfunctional company run democratically by it's employees.hire several coders and help out on this. It keeps the money local and is still cheaper.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
My question is why purchase Office 2007 if you migrated all those other computers to OpenOffice? why not give the few who were bitching older copies of Office 2003 or whatever and leave the remaining (happy) users on OO?
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Yep. I've used OpenOffice to access documents that crash Microsoft Office applications, too. These are good tools to keep around for this reason alone.
--Richard