Point-by-point rebuttals: On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 3:27 PM, Viet Le <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > It will take much time for NUS to realize, evaluate, develop & introduce new > policies and put great effort & costs to change staff & students' attitude & > behavior towards FOSS. NUS does not receive "free" M$ Windows Vista & I think you meant here 'does receive.'
> Office, SDK, Visual Studio versions "for free" (check mysoc account for free > download; Helpdesk is allowed to issue multiple licenses) . There must be > certain restrictions on NUS side to "protect" M$ popularity. To be fair, I disagree. AFAIK, it's Microsoft that has a big stake here. If NUS were to move away from MS, Microsoft will really lose out on all the young programmers programming with Sun Java, or C/C++, or PHP, or Python, or Perl, etc. It is in Microsoft interest to give NUS freebies. Heck, a lot of vendors are giving NUS cheap stuffs. Why? Because they want NUS students to be exposed to these products!! > FOSS yet to have sound replacement for M$ Exchange server & OpenOffice is > not an adequate substitute to M$ Office. In terms of MSOffice v. OpenOffice, depends. If you're talking of general usage of Writer, etc., OOo is more than good enough for most students. Only Excel for finance is generally better than OOo. MS Exchange? Please. Many big companies are using open source mail server. SoC uses UNIX-based mail server. Heck, I'm sure Google doesn't use MS Exchange! IMO, MS Exchange is pretty weak. > > Moreover, much time, effort & costs have been invested on the current > infrastructure. Sudden switching is really a shock to both staff & students > and is unjustifiable in term of planning. I agree. But you have to look at this from long-term perspective. The long-term cost of a switch is actually cheaper. This is the problem with short-term foresight. When they see that the amount of money and time to be invested is huge in the next few months, they will not like it. Although in long-term the benefits may be huge. It's the same with energy audit. The initial cost is huge, but the savings are tremendous. For School of Computing, the benefits are even greater, because it paves the way for students to learn more useful stuffs (then again, I heard that SoC needs to split CS1102 into two courses due to declining students' quality--rumour alert!). > > For the open courses & materials, there is much concern about the copyright > & IP rights in the NUS policy. I regard the slides & syllabi are instances & > representations of knowledge accumulated by human. Regardless of the form, > shape & color they take, knowledge remains the same. Why should ppl restrict > sharing just because they put pictures into the slides & redecorate > knowledge they have obtained from others? Because if you kena sued, you have to pay tonnes of legal fees and the probability of losing. And no, knowledge does not remain the same. They evolved. Especially so for CS students. It is pretty difficult to come up with meaningful representation of knowledge by yourself (for example, graphs, etc. takes effort to create), so copyright is a mean to protect your own interest. Imagine if your open-source code is stolen by somebody else without crediting you, you would probably mind, a lot. Thanks for reading my long, long post. (: Regards, Chris _______________________________________________ Slugnet mailing list [email protected] http://wiki.lugs.org.sg/LugsMailingListFaq http://www.lugs.org.sg/mailman/listinfo/slugnet
