Hi All,
OpenOffice.org
Open Office becomes Libre Office
By tbateson - Posted on September 30th, 2010
Given all the recent uncertainty about Open Office since the Oracle take over.
A new organisation to known as The Document Foundation http://www.documentfoundation.org/ has been started by some of the leading lights from the Open Office community and Open office has been forked to become Libre Office.
A number of leading distros makers such as Canonical, Novell and Google have already sponsored the project.
How to justify OpenOffice?
By esyrett - Posted on September 1st, 2010
I am a governor at a lower school, and I also work in IT, so I am aware of the savings that can be made by using open source software.
I have suggested several times that the school could save money by using the free OpenOffice package instead of purchasing licenses for Microsoft Office 2003, but the schools view is that children would eventually have to learn MS Office anyway when they leave school, so there is little point in making them use an alternative package.
To be fair, I don't think they are spending much on the MS Office licenses - the cost of the hardware is far more significant. However, I would still be interested in how other schools justify OpenSource when there is resistance like this.
The Guardian on switching to ODF
A good piece from the Guardian's Charles Arthur yesterday, reporting teacher and Windsor & Maidenhead councillor Liam Maxwell's analysis, of how much councils could save by switching to Open Document Format, as used in OpenOffice.org: some £200M if all councils did this for all their staff. There was some background to this, about the problems encountered by Windsor and Maidenhead, on Computer Weekly's site on Wedensday.
The key stumbling block for councils, as for schools, appears to be compatibility with others systems, most notably those supplied by Capita. Liam calls for the Cabinet Office to strengthen its present position on open source and open standards by mandating ODF as a standards across the public sector, were this to happen I don't doubt that we'd see Capita quickly make SIMS and their other products compatible with OpenOffice.org, making it far easier for schools and councils to choose their office suite from all those available, rather than forcing them to pay for MS Office, bundled with 'features' which many will rarely if ever use. Charles seems to think that such a requirement is far more likely with Francis Maude at the Cabinet Office than it had ever been under the previous administration, even in Tom Watson's day.
OpenOffice
Hi,
We've recently reviewed our position statement on Office applications, and part of this is to give schools the option of using OpenOffice in the Curriculum rather than Microsoft Office. We're now in the process of creating an msi to deploy OO via GPO. This potentially could end up in 400+ schools, so I'm keen to learn if other people have deployed OO via an msi, and if so:
Computer Weekly polls organisations on Microsoft vs Open Source products
By daibarnes - Posted on October 28th, 2009
http://epidm.edgesuite.net/RBI/computerweekly/CWRES/HTML/SurveyResults2.pdf
This highlights the uptake of OSS various sized organisations have done. MS is unsurprisingly the winner. The trialled statistics are interesting.
Implications for education?
1. MS dominates and therefore we should make sure we are using MS products to best prepare our pupils for their futures.
2. Using OSS in education is clearly more important as we remove obstacles to use OSS by providing rich and dependable experiences for our young people who will feed this into industry.
3.
Tagged:
OpenOffice about to reach 100 millionth download
By IanL - Posted on October 25th, 2009
The OpenOffice.org community anticipate the 100 millionth download around Tuesday.
Tagged:
Open Source Software: What School Leaders Should Know
A post by secondary school modern languages faculty leader, fast-track teacher and freelance writer Laura Walker, published originally at http://mrslwalker.com/index.php/2009/04/26/open-source-software/, reproduced here with permission.
Open Source Software (OSS) is computer software that can be used, changed and distributed by users. It’s usually free of charge, and it’s becoming increasingly popular. So why should school leaders pay attention? Mark Clarkson, ICT teacher explains: “Open Source tools make it easy for students, parents and staff to access software without the need to buy expensive licenses or to illegally download programs. Microsoft Office ranges in price from £100 to over £500, whereas OpenOffice - which features a powerful word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation tool equivalent to Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint; comes completely free of charge.”
