Open Office is an excellent cost cutting measure that makes for a viable alternative to the $300+ MS Office suite about 75% of the time, and maybe even more than that in an educational environment. We did this at my children’s small, privately funded Christian school where the two choices we had were Open Office or nothing. I am right now in the midst of putting together our elementary computer lab, and the donated machines that don’t have a Windows license are getting PC Linux 2007 and Open Office put on them.
Speaking from the Educational IT world, open source is not going to catch on any time soon.
Every license we own for Office 2000 ( 1500+ ) is transportable under our SLA, which means that if we retire an old computer, we uninstall office, and load it on the new machine. A new license for 2003 costs us $76 per computer. All of our licenses allow for the user to load a “second copy” on their home computer without penalty. The only caveat is, their husband or wife can’t be at home, with Office open, while they’re at work at school, with Office open. But since this is impossible for Microsoft to track, I’m not too worried about it. We just get the users to sign an acknowledgement that only 1 copy can be open at a time.
With that sort of pricing structure, and “re-use” of licenses, it’s impossible to convince those that sign the checks, that a major shift over to open source is going to be “cost effective”. I agree with them. We might save about $7,000 per year in new licensing fees, but we can afford the 7K. What we cannot afford, is taking users out of the classroom for several days, and hiring substitute teachers at $100 per day, so they can learn the Open Source solution, and the follow up time of technicians to troubleshoot “why this doesn’t work, but it works in office....”
Bottom line. MS Office 2003 license = $76 Loading Open Office or Star Office, and two days training = $200.
If we were starting from scratch, and every user in the new school had never been exposed to a PC, then I’d go Open Source, but that’s a luxury, we’ll never see.
Throw in the final monkey wrench, and that is, neither open office, nor Star office integrates with Groupwise, but MS Office does, and you’re trying to piss up a rope.
Did you know, that for educational entities, Microsoft offers free licenses for 98, 2000, and XP for donated computers.
You merely have to apply, send a letter letting Microsoft know where the computers came from, and they will send you a volume licensing agreement, and for $10... the install CD.
I’ve got nothing against Linux, but when you average 1 technician for ever 1000 users, which is par for the course for education, you go, with what you know. And Linux, is not that foolproof, and is not user friendly for novice users.
Give me a clean load of 98SE on a PII 400 mhz with 128mb of ram, and I’ll show you a machine that zips through web browsing, and word processing programs, faster than any open source kludge patched to the hilt to “fit into the system”.