[Opensource] FOSS - different arguments

[Glen Turner]

Cameron Bell wrote:
> Bugger 24 hours too late.
> I was having a "robust discussion" ;)  in the staff room yesterday and 
> was told by those "in the know" that big business still use MS Office 
> and *always will*.

What Big Business use is no guidance at all, as the results are
indeterminate.  If you look in the server area of a Big Business you'd
think all computers used Solaris and Linux. If you looked into
the graphics design area you think all computers were Macs. If
you look into an engineering area you'd be very confused by
all the Macs running Linux.

Just a few years ago if you'd looked on the other side of the average
customer service desk you would have found a mainframe terminal.
Schools didn't see that as a reason to run mainframes, or even
teach people how they operated (the distinction between Return
and Enter being particularly important).

Better to simply choose what works for you in achieving your
educational goals.

> I think I am going to put in place a policy of "I don't care what 
> Application you use, as long as the files it produces are: odt, pdf, 
> jpg,  <insert lots of open file formats>"
> Specifying acceptable file types rather than acceptable Applications may 
> be a better way to go. People can choose the app they are most 
> comfortable with, although some apps are better than others for certain 
> file types. ;)

I've been down that road and it ends up at PDF. The reason is that
it's one thing to be e-mailed the document in .DOC/.DOCX/.ODT and
another thing entirely to be e-mailed the fonts referenced by that
document.  That's especially so for presentations, where you might
download some fonts from the web.

The big fly in that ointment for a school is the money or complexity
in producing PDF documents from Office 2003.

If multiple people need to edit a complex document then it really
sucks if the editing platforms are different, even if the document
format is identical. It's not just the small incompatibilities, but
the different ways of working (eg, templates in ODF actually work,
but they don't work in Office, so no Office user uses them).

-- 
  Glen Turner   <http://www.gdt.id.au/~gdt/>