New Zealand Rejects Office For Macs

An anonymous reader writes "The New Zealand Ministry of Education has declined to renew a licensing deal for MS Office on 25,000 Macintosh computers in the country's schools. The Education Minister has suggested that schools use the free alternative NeoOffice. The article quotes a school principal who pointed out that the NeoOffice website warns users to expect problems and bugs: 'That's not the sort of software we should be expecting kids in New Zealand to be using.'" Schools are free to buy their own copies of Office. A blog on the New Zealand Herald site argues that the Ministry should have paid Microsoft this time, but not renewed the deal and instead developed a transition plan to open source.

Re:Maybe NZ government are just playing it smart!

[Anonymous Coward]

Several U.K. local councils and schools pay virtually nothing for MS products to prevent them trialling Linux.

...and they're still getting a bad deal!

Re:It'll do the job.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I was going to say -- for graphing a quadratic function or pasting plagiarized text out of Wikipedia, it'll be fine.

Re:Expect problems and bugs with OS software?

[klubar]

Funny, I find the the open office always crashes if I remove the ram in the middle of anything. Must be buggy.

Re:Expect problems and bugs with OS software?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually IIRC this happens because of faulty drivers too.
MS blames driver dev's of using undocumented API functionality and the driver dev's blame MS for delivering crappy API's..

hmm.. why cant both be right? :)

Re:Expect problems and bugs with OS software?

[Ohreally_factor]

Are you grounding yourself? This is critically important if you're removing RAM while the computer is running. To ground yourself, simply touch your hand to your stomach. Don't touch your belt buckle,or you could electrocute yourself.

Re:Expect problems and bugs with OS software?

[lilomar]

Dude, you hot-unplug the RAM and the only thing that crashes is OpenOffice?
What distro are you running again?

(Yes, mods, I realize he was being sarcastic, so am I.)