Thane Sherrington wrote:
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
You're pretty clueless here, Thane.
