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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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How much do they save, and is there a way to invest some of this money into further development of NeoOffice?
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
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 haven't been to the NeoOffice website in a very long time, since I started to use just plain Open Office. But... the last time I was there the website had the least friendly, over the top disclaimers found any on the web, save Microsoft's "Get the Facts" FUD page.
OK so the NeoOffice developers have issues with their social skills, does this have much to do with the feature set and bugs of NeoOffice as compared with Open Office, Microsoft Office, or iWork?
Personally I think all three are way overkill for students writing papers. Hell, I don't think I've ever used more than 10 or 20% of MS Office's features and I use it work nearly every day and have for over 10 years. Is there an Open Source project like Apple's 'Pages'? This, I think, would be closer to useful and a lot more fun.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
If the experiences from U.K. councils and schools looking to ditch Office and Windows is anything to go by, Microsoft will probably return to the New Zealand government with an even better offer!
Microsoft are terrified of the thought of educational and public authorities ditching MS products as they know that successful operation of non-MS products in these sort of institutions will lead others - and ultimately corporations (their biggest market) - to consider alternatives.
Several U.K. local councils and schools pay virtually nothing for MS products to prevent them trialling Linux.
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.
I'm the Network Manager for a small private school. Recently, our school was audited, and we found that we were short on our MS office licensing.
I proposed Open Office as a viable replacement for most of our machines. Administration would continue to use MS Office alongside of Open Office. The school's administration tried Open Office, and after a short learning curve, they liked the software. The only real complaint was that the menus were different from MS Office. Administration assumed that teaching "professionals" would learn the new software and continue on with their jobs.
It took an entire year, but the whole school was eventually migrated to Open Office, and it worked for most people. A few, very loud teachers, hated it.
Those very loud teachers made lots of noise - so much so that administration finally coughed up $11,000 for MS Office 2007.
After another lengthy deployment process, we had Office 2007 in place. Now the very loud teachers are complaining the new software is different from the old stuff.
You can't win with Teachers.
-ted
Several times recently I've been handed a PowerPoint file (from a Windows user) with graphics in it, that either fail to render, or worse that crash Microsoft PowerPoint. The files open just fine in NeoOffice... I've also used an old version of Keynote (1.1) to work around Microsoft PowerPoint bugs opening PowerPooint presentations...
dave
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...
They tell you out in front what to expect from their software.....
You did read the EULA didn't you? No? Really?
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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.
The New Zealand Government is going to save a bucket load of cash by using Neo Office instead of Microsoft Office. Plus they've got peace of mind that not going to get stung for going over their licences or be reported for piracy, etc.
Why not donate a significant amount to the Neo Office project each year to encourage development and/or place a bounty on features that they'd like to see included or fixed.
If every district/county/state/country did something like that we'd have the best of breed open source software in the world available for everyone to use for free.
Even though some software is free as is beer, the reason for this is so that it can truely be free as in freedom. Free as in beer doesn't stop you contributing back whatever you can to benefit everyone.
I'm no tree-hugging GPL/GNU beardy freak, but I do appriecate the efforts these guys have made for the Mac Platform and have been thinking about donating myself - even though I only downloaded and used it once to open a single document.
When I copy/paste into Neooffice, I get just the plain text--no links are preserved. I looked through the options to try to figure it out, to no avail. Haven't opened up NeoOffice since then. If anyone knows a way to fix that problem, please tell me. You can even throw in some gratuitous "lame noob" insults if it makes you feel better.
On a side note, I really wish someone smarter than me (is that a big enough labor pool for you?) would write a print-to-pdf type program that keeps the hyperlinks intact. I don't know what mojo OpenOffice uses to preserve the hyperlinks from text copied to the clipboard, but there is no doubt a way to make a one-trick application that prints a section of html to pdf while keeping the hyperlinks intact. Yes, I'd pay for it. Any ideas?
Working as the the technology admin for a school district, I can vouch for the insanity that runs through educators minds.
I'm amazed when the majority of the people tasked with teaching our children the fundamentals of computing (basic word processing etc..) in a completely controlled environment can even turn their computers on and log in. Most educators learn to navigate around in MS office and the mention of new software generally causes them to wet themselves. Anytime a move to a open source solution is discussed, it is almost immediately destroyed by administration. This is despite the fact that most public schools are extremely cash strapped and moving to open source makes immediate financial sense. This has more to do with fear than anything else. Even though education recieves discounts from MS and others, the costs can still be considered high.
Lobbying for open source office solutions makes sense in school settings for a simple reason: anyone can acquire and use this stuff at home. I can't tell you the amount of times we've had to help students convert files between platforms so we get their work to jive with MS office. Most people can't afford or are willing to purchase this software for home use, yet in schools we are using full versions of MS office.Your television will not tell you when to start the revolution.
I use OO (Open Office) on my Sun workstation and MS Office on my desktop machine at work, as well as OO on my Linux workstation and NeoOffice on my Macbook Pro at home.
.csv formatting, and lack of scalability with its Access database. I have yet to run into similar issues, or any issues for that matter, running OO or NeoOffice.
To compare MS Office and OO/NeoOffice and say MS Office has no problems would be stretching the truth. I've had to deal with some show stoppers on MS Office - particularly its inconsistent spreadsheet support for
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Actually, they *are* switching from MS Office to iWork. NeoOffice is only being mentioned as an alternative for those people/schools who think they need more than iWork provides.
;-) ). His beef with the current situation seems to be that schools were told that certain software would be made available to them under a central license, and at that point his school chose to use Macs. Now, the software he was told would be available is going to cost them an extra NZ$4000, when schools who chose to use PCs are not being disadvantaged.
The head teacher quoted mentioned that there would be compatibility issues with them using different software, and that it was hard enough teaching students and staff to save things in the right place anyway, never mind having to choose a format to save in. He then went on to say that he wasn't actually familiar with the alternatives that it is being suggested they use (and hence really didn't know whether there would *actually* be issues), but that he was concerned about it anyway.
At that point, I was thinking "lazy fool" - surely teaching kids the general principles to enable them to use any piece of suitable software is precisely what they *should* be doing, not taking the short-cut and getting the kids hooked on MS' bait-and-switch (it's cheap and easy now, but when you want to do it for yourself in a few years' time...).
Anyway, as it went on he also said that he would like to see the whole system move away from MS, and towards Open Source (and I thought maybe he wasn't such an idiot after all
The "man from the ministry" being interviewed at the same time seemed to be knowledgeable and competent, and mentioned that MS had been very helpful (agreeing to remove the macs from the license, which they don't like to do, as I expect anyone with an MCA will tell you), and that is likely that they will be moving more towards Open Source over the next few years. I think I heard NZ$30m over 3 years mentioned in that context, and maybe $5m saved by cutting out Office for Macs.
In short, they were agreeing violently on most issues - but not on whether or not the head's school should be given NZ$4000 to buy MS Office for the machines on which they've decided they really want it. I expect that once they've tried Keynote (it seemed to be Powerpoint he was most worried about) they'll be pretty happy with it.
The real issue here would seem to be the way the press (NZ Herald in particular I believe) have reported this minor or non- issue. I don't know whether they're biased, poor at their job, or just lazy... whichever way, they're full of something that looks & smells like the proverbial.