At 02:09 PM 25/08/2006, Anthony Q. Martin wrote:
That's not at all what you said, Thane. You said simply that if they aren't already using open office they aren't forward thinking and one should consider another school. That's really silly. No university forces any one (other than employees perhaps) to use any software. They work out licensing deals for software use that actually is advantageous for students and staff since they can get this stuff preloaded on their PCs. For the largest % of people, that's a big plus. For CS/CpE majors, etc., they can reformat and load what they want. Moreover, the choice of school should be based on factors other than issues of whether they have adopted MS software. Not everyone is so anti-MS.
Open Office is FOSS. That means the university can offer its students a free product, and its CompSci dept can make upgrades and improvements and make name for themselves (and improve the software world and get real world experience.) That makes OO a better choice than MS for the educational world. I would say that all other things being equal, a university that chooses OS software over CS software is the one to pick. In fact, since so much of a university's value is in what you put into it, especially in the computer science world, I'd pick an all FOSS university with a worse reputation over one that pushed MS products and had a better reputation.
A unverisity that told me I *must* purchase MS Office, regardless of how cheap they make it, is more interested in deals with large corporations than in my education. I'm willing to bet that this attitude is going to be prevalent in other areas as well (which there is no good way of evaluating.)
T
