On Sat, 8 Mar 2003, Donald J Bindner wrote: > On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 05:00:17PM -0600, Jon Beck wrote: > > So I'm curious: from your personal point of view, what do you think a > > big corporation like IBM could do to foster the adoption of open > > standards software and systems (from any source, not just IBM) in the > > higher education arena in general and at Truman specifically? [snip] > You would want to be focused. Target illegitimate users of > Office and promote an open alternative like OpenOffice. Target > illegitimate users of Windows and suggest your favorite Linux > distribution. Not everyone is going to jump to Linux, but you > are putting a new idea in a few heads. Sell people on Mozilla > because it blocks popup ads. Make the idea romantic, make it > noble, make it big and shiny and poster-sized. [snip] > -- > Don Bindner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> We can probably do more to encourage this then IBM, but having OpenOffice or StarOffice on all the lab computers would do a lot to encourage open standards. I know I would find it handy. Perhaps simply raising the awareness of other office suites would do a lot. Maybe professors wouldn't be as apt to posting word files (word files being the arch-enemy of open standards of course.)
StarOffice would be free since Sun has a program that gives it away to universities for use on their computers (outside of the cost of the first piece of media). It would be nice just for the commericial spell checker, while still being fully compatible with OpenOffice I believe. Doesn't IBM have an office suite in their closet somewhere? Lotus something? As long as we're making suggestions, make that open source. The open source community will make it open standards compliant quick enough. I imagine they would have the problems Sun did with the various 3rd party source code, oh well. Ian Monroe http://www.monroe.nu ----------------------------------------------------------------- To get off this list, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with Subject: unsubscribe -----------------------------------------------------------------
