Thanks!
Getting open source onto servers is nowadays pretty transparent to end
users, but getting it to the desktop is much more of a challenge,
especially when your choice effects many who are not just employees, but
also the customers of your organisation and who are choosing to be there.
OpenOffice.org has come along way for this to now be a comfortable and
somewhat pleasing reality (and it has taken much longer for this to
happen on the Mac platform). While there are always the grumblers when
it comes to change and end user desktop habits are generally very well
entrenched, especially word processing and spreadsheet skills, but in
this case I think it looks like it is all going surprisingly well...
Many people are moving to OpenOffice these days and while it is now not
unusual globally, my feeling is that wide adoption of open source on the
desktop is still lagging far behind in Singapore. Besides Mindef, I
think all government departments use MS Office (correct me if I'm wrong
but I believe it may be a requirement), and also by far the vast
majority of local schools do as well (which may also be a MOE
requirement?). Singapore also bowed down to commercial pressures and
voted to approve Office XML against the advice of its advising technical
committee.
For schools here, I believe it is more of a philosophical venture rather
than cost saving one (why OFS are running Apple Mac) as Microsoft
educational licensing is very very attractive. The cost of migration may
well outweigh the saving on licensing fees at least for the first few
years, but this is not the reasoning behind doing it.
In terms of getting students to see alternatives and influence their
view of software in the future, I believe they will be achieving many of
their educational learning objectives and this is more of the thinking
behind their choice. It actually makes you realise how insidious the
current educational licensing "candy" extended to schools is,
considering it is just a hook to lock students minds into a proprietary
software model at as younger age as possible. Education is about the
openness and sharing of information (much more in line with the
philosophy behind open source).
It think this serves as a good example of open source not just being a
"free as in cost" alternative, and to set an example for others in
Singapore to contribute back in some way to the upstream projects doing
the work (not just the consultants like us that are implementing open
source). i.e. if every school that switched to OpenOffice donated a few
thousand dollars to the OpenOffice.org foundation, then we would see
much more rapid progress - as we all know that programmers need to eat -
even ones with strong ideologies.
:)
Michael.
C David Rigby wrote:
Very interesting news Michael, thanks for sharing it. This is how FOSS
grows. It's no longer just the early adopters, individual enthusiasts
and large corporations that are making in-roads.
Cheers
CDRigby
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 4:00 AM, Michael Clark
<[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
Hi All,
Just to let you all know that over the coming months, the number
of OpenOffice.org users in Singapore will be jumping up by a few
thousand more.
Overseas Family School (OFS) have just announced their switch to
OpenOffice.org with all faculty and students making the switchover
(3500+ users on 1500 computers)
http://www.ofs.edu.sg/about-ofs/announcements/openoffice/
OFS has donated SGD15,000 to OpenOffice.org and they have authored
and made freely available a number of training videos that may be
useful for others making the switch to OpenOffice.org. See:
http://www.ofs.edu.sg/help-desk/using-open-office/
This has been a long time coming, as OFS, a large user of Mac OS
X, have been patiently waiting for the release of OpenOffice.org
3.0 which has native Mac OS X support.
There has been much planning, testing, implementation and training
work, with the faculty beginning the migration of documents over
to ODF in January 2008. It is really great to now reach the point
where OpenOffice.org and ODF are becoming ubiquitous within this
large international school in Singapore.
Michael.
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