[Opensource] Openoffice in NSW education

[victor rajewski]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 7:51 AM, Pia Waugh <pia at waughpartners.com.au> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>  http://www.afr.com/home/viewer.aspx?ATL://20080409000020521011&title=NSW+education+downgrades+Microsoft+deal
>
>  It was freely available yesterday :( But basically Openoffice is on the
>  cards, and being rolled out to tens of thousands of NSW education sector
>  computers. Yay!

Call me cynical, but I reckon they're using OO.org to push MS into
giving them a better deal. Has happened numerous times to date -
Company/City/State/Country says "we're going to run everything on
linux/oo.org/[other OSS app]", Microsoft goes into a flurry, offers a
vastly cheaper deal, and the Company/City/State/Country decides to
stay with MS. Which is not an outright bad outcome - it's forcing MS
to reconsider its monopolistic pricing structure, but ultimately not
the most ideal outcome either.

On the other hand, I've heard rumours the NSW dept of ed is looking at
deploying the open-source video sharing system Plumi (like an open
youtube that you can host on your own server), so maybe they are
looking into OSS seriously.

ciao

vik