[Opensource] BBC Article - Schools warned off Microsoft

[Cameron Bell]

Thanks for the information Pia! Very interesting.
Cheers
Cameron

Pia Waugh wrote:
> Hi Stephen,
>
> <quote who="Stephen Bloomer">
>
>   
>> Now on the other side. If it was up to me I would have our whole school
>> using Open Office, but we can't.  BUT our administration staff are
>> required to be compatible with numerous State and Catholic departments.
>> Our teachers need to be compatible with our administration staff and the
>> students need to be compatible with the teachers.  Here is how some
>> countries have fixed it.  They legislated that all government documents
>> MUST be stored in a format that enables the public to access the data
>> without financial burden.  This forces government departments to store
>> and use data in an open format.  Once this occurs the other areas will
>> also see the financial benefit of moving to Open Office and there will
>> be no file format issues.  To remain competitive, Microsoft would have
>> to make there format open to all. 
>>     
>
> Luckily this is starting to happen. I was physically at the Microsoft campus
> at Redmond early this year, invited to a "Technology Summit" about Open
> Source which was very fascinating :) Anyway, the head of the Open Source
> labs made very clear that MS are getting a _lot_ of pressure from the market
> and that it was "inevitable" that they would have to support ODF. So keep
> the pressure on! :)
>
> With countries from Europe, Asia, and in various places throughout the US,
> UK and Australia all starting to prefer ODF, it simply wouldn't make
> business sense to not support ODF.
>
> Little tidbit for you, the ODF plugin for MS Office is pretty good, _but_ it
> essentially is a cut down version of OpenOffice. So the MS Office odf plugin
> (by Sun) basically loads Open Office to save in ODF.
>
> Cheers,
> Pia
>
>