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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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.