[Opensource] BBC Article - Schools warned off Microsoft

[Pia Waugh]

Hi Stephen,

<quote who="Stephen Bloomer">

> Now on the other side. If it was up to me I would have our whole school
> using Open Office, but we can't.  BUT our administration staff are
> required to be compatible with numerous State and Catholic departments.
> Our teachers need to be compatible with our administration staff and the
> students need to be compatible with the teachers.  Here is how some
> countries have fixed it.  They legislated that all government documents
> MUST be stored in a format that enables the public to access the data
> without financial burden.  This forces government departments to store
> and use data in an open format.  Once this occurs the other areas will
> also see the financial benefit of moving to Open Office and there will
> be no file format issues.  To remain competitive, Microsoft would have
> to make there format open to all. 

Luckily this is starting to happen. I was physically at the Microsoft campus
at Redmond early this year, invited to a "Technology Summit" about Open
Source which was very fascinating :) Anyway, the head of the Open Source
labs made very clear that MS are getting a _lot_ of pressure from the market
and that it was "inevitable" that they would have to support ODF. So keep
the pressure on! :)

With countries from Europe, Asia, and in various places throughout the US,
UK and Australia all starting to prefer ODF, it simply wouldn't make
business sense to not support ODF.

Little tidbit for you, the ODF plugin for MS Office is pretty good, _but_ it
essentially is a cut down version of OpenOffice. So the MS Office odf plugin
(by Sun) basically loads Open Office to save in ODF.

Cheers,
Pia

-- 
Linux Australia                                         http://linux.org.au/
 
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