Andrew:
I never write but this time I am compelled to respond. I have an IT
ministry involving 45 churches and 50 support ministries. I have tried
to get Open Office into use system wide. The problem is the different
churches have varying resources to draw upon. I have seen a couple of
churches with Windows 95 still in use! "It works why spend God's money
to change?" My biggest problem is training. There are too few online
training classes, and the lack of books on Open Office is marginally
better. When modern training tools are available all of us will have
better results gaining users of Open Office. Thunderbird and Firefox
are simple and anyone can use the software with little or no training.
I mention this because of the wide acceptance of these two packages, I
think folks want to use free software. IF Open Office were completely
intuitive (not an entirely desirable goal) OR if there were good
training tools available so the user could learn to use all the
features, then we would be one step closer to wide base acceptance.
I say one step closer because the 2nd reason for paid software use, is
the inertia of humanity. None of use really wants to change much of
anything that we do, by habit. This would bring up what I think should
be the plan for unseating MS Office. Teacher support. If Open Office
had a complete set of tools for teachers--lesson plans, syllabus, tests,
evaluations materials, etc.. So that said--the key to advancing all of
the missions is training.
JMHO, Blessings,
Phil Bogle
Tillamook County Oregon, USA
Andrew Greig wrote:
On Sat, 2008-01-05 at 10:17 -0600, Vicky Collins wrote:
yes where live it takes forever to download this program, the dial up is
awful.... I would like to get 10 of these disks to pass to my friends. I
bought the download from ebay, but then I found out the program was free.
Please let me know how much this would cost......
Vicky Collins
Hcr 77 Box 44 B
Annapolis Missouri 63620 573-598-3716
Joshua 1:9 Have not I commanded Thee? Be strong and of good courage; be not
afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee
whithersoever thou goest.
Hi Vicky
If you have a copy of OpenOffice.org on disc, then you may simply
duplicate the discs and give them to your friends. There is no need to
purchase more CDs, as the GNU Public license gives you the right to
distribute the program. Most distributors of OpenOffice.org charge a
token fee to cover their costs in purchasing, burning, packaging and
mailing disks, although the program is free to download.
In theory, I could ask $300.00 for the software I put on my CDs, and I
may find a few who would pay it. Make no mistake, this is a high
quality product, but the Open Source way of doing things is intended to
significantly benefit the community of computer users.
Why more Churches have not abandoned their support of Microsoft just
beggars belief. Can you imagine the licence fees that a large missionary
organisation pays to use MS Office, what does this say about their
stewardship? And why support an abusive monopolist (convicted) with the
LORDs money?
With the tools that are available through Open Source software, a Church
could run without Microsoft at all, and the funds could be applied to
the mission field.
I threw this in because of your signature text.
God bless
Andrew Greig
Melbourne, Australia
Community Distributor, OpenOffice.org
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