New Zealand Rejects Office For Macs 317
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.
How much? (Score:5, Interesting)
They exaggerate (Score:3, Interesting)
OK so the NeoOffice developers have issues with their social skills, does this have much to do with the feature set and bugs of NeoOffice as compared with Open Office, Microsoft Office, or iWork?
Personally I think all three are way overkill for students writing papers. Hell, I don't think I've ever used more than 10 or 20% of MS Office's features and I use it work nearly every day and have for over 10 years. Is there an Open Source project like Apple's 'Pages'? This, I think, would be closer to useful and a lot more fun.
Maybe NZ government are just playing it smart! (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft are terrified of the thought of educational and public authorities ditching MS products as they know that successful operation of non-MS products in these sort of institutions will lead others - and ultimately corporations (their biggest market) - to consider alternatives.
Several U.K. local councils and schools pay virtually nothing for MS products to prevent them trialling Linux.
Re:Expect problems and bugs with OS software? (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
I use NeoOffice to work around MS Office bugs (Score:4, Interesting)
dave
Re:Expect problems and bugs with OS software? (Score:2, Interesting)
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL
Re:How much? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, we know they're saving more than $2.7m and less than $100m, but we're not told exactly how much.
By the way, macs aren't extensively used outside of primary (roughly, elementary schools) and intermediate (school years 7-8) in New Zealand. Every high school I can think of (many) have one or two macs at most, and classes full of PCs. So, to my mind, Le Sueur is wrong, and NeoOffice _is_ the sort of software we can expect kids to use. It's unreasonable to claim five to twelve year olds have a need for (supposedly) superior, high-class spreadsheets, databases and business presentations.
Re:Expect problems and bugs with OS software? (Score:2, Interesting)
I run Debian testing/unstable, and it's very stable in the sense of seldom crashing, but it's also very unstable in that you never know exactly what's going to happen when you type "apt-get upgrade", or just what seemingly unrelated packages you're going to have to install or uninstall to install some fancy new program through apt. (I suppose many people do understand these processes better than me; I'm not a Debian expert, just a user.)
This can be frustrating at times. As was said on bash.org: <jamesd> "... being a Linux user is sort of like living in a house inhabited by a large family of carpenters and architects. Every morning when you wake up, the house is a little different. Maybe there is a new turret, or some walls have moved. Or perhaps someone has temporarily removed the floor under your bed." [bash.org]
donate to help make improvements (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not donate a significant amount to the Neo Office project each year to encourage development and/or place a bounty on features that they'd like to see included or fixed.
If every district/county/state/country did something like that we'd have the best of breed open source software in the world available for everyone to use for free.
Even though some software is free as is beer, the reason for this is so that it can truely be free as in freedom. Free as in beer doesn't stop you contributing back whatever you can to benefit everyone.
I'm no tree-hugging GPL/GNU beardy freak, but I do appriecate the efforts these guys have made for the Mac Platform and have been thinking about donating myself - even though I only downloaded and used it once to open a single document.
my prob with NeoOffice (Score:3, Interesting)
When I copy/paste into Neooffice, I get just the plain text--no links are preserved. I looked through the options to try to figure it out, to no avail. Haven't opened up NeoOffice since then. If anyone knows a way to fix that problem, please tell me. You can even throw in some gratuitous "lame noob" insults if it makes you feel better.
On a side note, I really wish someone smarter than me (is that a big enough labor pool for you?) would write a print-to-pdf type program that keeps the hyperlinks intact. I don't know what mojo OpenOffice uses to preserve the hyperlinks from text copied to the clipboard, but there is no doubt a way to make a one-trick application that prints a section of html to pdf while keeping the hyperlinks intact. Yes, I'd pay for it. Any ideas?
Re:Expect problems and bugs with OS software? (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, hardware that utterly fails under one operating system can work flawlessly under another. They have different drivers. In almost all cases, windows drivers are binary blobs that are developed by the device manufacturer or someone they have retained under contract to do so for them. Most Linux drivers are reverse engineered or developed from specs and are open source drivers which come with the kernel.
In practice, either one might be more reliable; if the Linux driver isn't very good, which is often the case (it can be hard to write a good, stable driver without specs) then it might not work under Linux properly, but be fine under Windows. If the Windows driver is a pile of crap, it might work better under Linux.
For example, my last desktop system was an Athlon XP 2500+ with a Radeon 9600XT. The system would bluescreen on boot if I had the catalyst control center installed. But once I booted up in safe mode and removed CCC, the driver worked "fine" (it still sucked - we're talking about ATI here. but no bluescreens.) Some people just can't write a fucking driver.
Re:Teach Concepts, Not Apps (Score:2, Interesting)
My kids however, will go to a school where they will use the most up to date tools. I will encourage the school to actually buy books so they don't have to waste time making them and show by example well written books so they can aspire to emulate or improve on them. Secondly I want my kids to learn something like Office and learn it well. It's all very well learning 'concepts' but I also believe in learning some hard-core skills too (Its like reading and writing, why learn how to read and write when all that is needed is to know the 'concept' of reading and writing?!). Once they've learn't Office they can learn pretty much any office like tools. For those who leave school early and go for a job (yes people have to work), Office on their resume will do fine, for those who want to continue at school, they can afford to explore other 'office' like solutions.
We must learn to distinguish between training and education. Both are required but today there is too much emphasis on education so that, for example, when I get students for a summer job, they're next to worthless because they can't actually do anything useful.
Witness the problems parents are having with the new Discovery Math syllabus in the US. Better informed parents are having to send their students out to private tuition because discovery math only teaches concepts. The kids can barely do simple arithmetic when they leave. There must be an element of training in every course.
Ok, now I'm off my white horse.