Much the same findings about substantial financial savings and increases in reliability and useability in UK and Aus: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,2000061733,39191668,00.htm
Still can't get schools and NGOs to use FLOSS in any numbers tho :-( -- the power of FUD. And "the world's biggest software company" is currently also making strategic large-scale donations of software upgrades with free technical assistance to UK government, health and educational departments which were actively considering migrating to FLOSS (especially if they were likely to become model systems). Paula Graham [EMAIL PROTECTED] J Cravens wrote: > Since debates about whether or not to use software from the dominant > software maker often come up in discussions about bridging the digital > divide, I'm posting the following from Slashdot (old news for you > Slashdot readers out there, but I'm catching up on a lot of email and > saw this only today): > > +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ > > "NewsForge (a Slashdot sister site) is carrying a 2-year > OpenOffice case-study on a Detroit high school who switched > from Windows NT and MS Office 97 to Linux and OpenOffice. > The results? Better than expected. In 2003, the school, who > saved over $100,000 in the process, converted 110 Windows > NT machines to Linux with OpenOffice. After several > surprising developments, including OpenOffice's ability to > open old Word documents that even the new Word versions > were having troubles with, the school now uses it almost > exclusively, has classes on it's use, and encourages > students to use it whenever possible. From the article: > 'While OpenOffice.org is now used by 100% of the faculty > and students in the school (though some administrative > staff still uses Microsoft Office due to specific software > requirements), students are not required to use > OpenOffice.org when working at home. However, a > presentation is given to students at the start of every > school year to advise them on the use of OpenOffice.org, > the availability of free copies, and potential problems of > converting from Microsoft Office formats.'" > > http://software.newsforge.com/software/05/05/18/1944227.shtml?tid=130&tid=93 > > > Slashdot discussion: > > Discuss this story at: > http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=05/05/27/1721224 > _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
