Yup -- they're using it on Solaris
We (another Saskatchewan school division) have used Star since the 5.1 days on Winboxen and now use 5.2 and 6beta on Windows, Linux and Solaris platforms. We haven't seen any reason to buy an office package for instructional use for years.
I am involved with a school division which uses Win, Mac, Linux and UNIX OSes and tries to use free (as in speech or beer) ware as much as possible.
After all the talk re the Microsoft/DOJ agreement with M$ setting itself up for increased profits using the poorest school systems in the country to do it and after Red Hat and various open source orgs have had a chance at counter proposing, here's another modest prop0$al related to the topic:
Public schools should only be using free (as in beer) software for instructional purposes where the product is released into the general marketplace. --OSs and application software. Schools have been willing assistants of private enterprise in advertizing the goods the kids will be buying at a future date. And we love to spend large chunks of our budgets to do this! What other industry has such a cohort of willing salespeople pushing product on a captive audience?
Public education is often criticised as having a prime focus on creating good consumers. We do that in spades when it comes to software use.
The ethics and legalities are at opposite poles. Ethically we should be exposing kids to all sorts of appropriate tools with an eye on the social and economic impact of what we do. We do exactly the opposite. Typically we get Windows onto a machine get Office and a few multimedia 'educational applications' and sell that to our community as being a complete solution. Ethically we should be doing something very different --rather than being front-line salespeople for Bill or Steve.
And legally we have to pay for the honor of being big business's flunkies! We have to pay a per-student or per-station license for most products from the private sector. As the useful life of hardware increases (ie using old machines as terminals on 'hot' servers as in the Linux Terminal Server Project) and the new boxes get cheaper -- as the ratio computers:people approaches 1:1 the system fails having to transfer huge amounts of capital to Redmond or Silicon Valley.
So schools should not be allowed to buy any general purpose commercial software and vendors should not be allowed to sell this stuff into public education!
That would leave budgets to buy 'real' instructional and administrative applications designed for the educational market and encourage development of needed software instead of the large amount of 'edutainment' ware targeted primarily at the home market.
So what are some of the free offerings we use:
Linux - all file services (netatalk samba, nfs) and all infrastructure services mail, web, DNS www proxying/filtering, nis...
Linux user applications: Star Office, GIMP, Netscape, Opera. Logo & Python in Computer Science (the games that go with K and Gnome)
Under Solaris: Netscape and Star Office on terminal (SunRay) servers as well as web proxying
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Yup -- they're using it on Solaris
We (another Saskatchewan school division) have used Star since the 5.1 days on Winboxen and now use 5.2 and 6beta on Windows, Linux and Solaris platforms. We haven't seen any reason to buy an office package for instructional use for years.
I am involved with a school division which uses Win, Mac, Linux and UNIX OSes and tries to use free (as in speech or beer) ware as much as possible.
After all the talk re the Microsoft/DOJ agreement with M$ setting itself up for increased profits using the poorest school systems in the country to do it and after Red Hat and various open source orgs have had a chance at counter proposing, here's another modest prop0$al related to the topic:
Public schools should only be using free (as in beer) software for instructional purposes where the product is released into the general marketplace. --OSs and application software. Schools have been willing assistants of private enterprise in advertizing the goods the kids will be buying at a future date. And we love to spend large chunks of our budgets to do this! What other industry has such a cohort of willing salespeople pushing product on a captive audience?
Public education is often criticised as having a prime focus on creating good consumers. We do that in spades when it comes to software use.
The ethics and legalities are at opposite poles. Ethically we should be exposing kids to all sorts of appropriate tools with an eye on the social and economic impact of what we do. We do exactly the opposite. Typically we get Windows onto a machine get Office and a few multimedia 'educational applications' and sell that to our community as being a complete solution. Ethically we should be doing something very different --rather than being front-line salespeople for Bill or Steve.
And legally we have to pay for the honor of being big business's flunkies! We have to pay a per-student or per-station license for most products from the private sector. As the useful life of hardware increases (ie using old machines as terminals on 'hot' servers as in the Linux Terminal Server Project) and the new boxes get cheaper -- as the ratio computers:people approaches 1:1 the system fails having to transfer huge amounts of capital to Redmond or Silicon Valley.
So schools should not be allowed to buy any general purpose commercial software and vendors should not be allowed to sell this stuff into public education!
That would leave budgets to buy 'real' instructional and administrative applications designed for the educational market and encourage development of needed software instead of the large amount of 'edutainment' ware targeted primarily at the home market.
So what are some of the free offerings we use:
Linux - all file services (netatalk samba, nfs) and all infrastructure services mail, web, DNS www proxying/filtering, nis
Linux user applications: Star Office, GIMP, Netscape, Opera. Logo & Python in Computer Science (the games that go with K and Gnome)
Under Solaris: Netscape and Star Office on terminal (SunRay) servers as well as web proxying