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.

Comments

How much?

[igny]

How much do they save, and is there a way to invest some of this money into further development of NeoOffice?

Re:How much?

[Domstersch]

It's unclear how much money they save. The total licensing deals the government has made with Microsoft are speculated to be worth about NZ$100 million (US$72m) over the next ten years. But the Maharey, the Minister of Education, said the dispute was regarding NZ$2.7m worth of Microsoft Office licenses that would not (otherwise) be used (because the macs in question aren't currently using Office) but which Microsoft insisted the Ministry pay for.

So, we know they're saving more than $2.7m and less than $100m, but we're not told exactly how much.

By the way, macs aren't extensively used outside of primary (roughly, elementary schools) and intermediate (school years 7-8) in New Zealand. Every high school I can think of (many) have one or two macs at most, and classes full of PCs. So, to my mind, Le Sueur is wrong, and NeoOffice _is_ the sort of software we can expect kids to use. It's unreasonable to claim five to twelve year olds have a need for (supposedly) superior, high-class spreadsheets, databases and business presentations.