Reply inline On Saturday 24 April 2010 08:42, FISHER II, WILLIAM wrote: > Hi all, > > > > We are a school District and have the same economic woes as everyone > else. We need to trim some of the fat from our licensing of > another office product. To satisfy the licensing coordinator for our > school district, what copy of a license can I show her to satisfy the > licensing requirements to load OpenOffice 3.2 to 37 school sites. >
Information about OpenOffice.org licenses is available here: http://www.openoffice.org/license.html The LGPL license of the program is intended to allow you many freedoms. Essentially you can download, share and use the program for free on as many computers as you wish in both business and home environments. This makes it ideal for an educational environment as the program can be given away on USB stick or CD to both teachers and students so that everybody has the same program. In fact the majority of the license deals with the freedoms and restrictions that apply to programmers that wish to change the source code of the program. OpenOffice.org saves by default in the open International ISO/IEC standard ODF XML based formats[1][2] but the user may change the default formats to the closed binary .DOC, .XLS and .PPT if desired. It also supports some measure of the open OOXML[3][4] XML standard (DOCX etc.). Open XML formats are desired by many governments and government departments now over closed binary save formats[5][6][7]. Please note Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 currently support an orphan, legacy version of the OOXML standard that is to be phased out[8][9]. Some retraining will be required in the migration of any business from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org. However generally the retraining is less from Office 2003 to OpenOffice.org than it is to Office 2007 with the ribbon. Documentation supporting this migration is available here[10]. [1] http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=43485 ISO/IEC standard [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument Supplied for casual background info [3] http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=51463 ISO/IEC standard [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooxml More background info [5] http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/NARA/XML_and_Binary.pdf Description and comparison between formats. [6] http://opensource.com/government/10/3/making-public-records-public-why-open-formats-are-essential-sharing-and-preserving-g Explains reasoning behind open data formats [7] http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-06.pdf Whitehouse memo to Executive departments and Agencies. [quote]To increase accountability, promote informed participation by the public, and create economic opportunity, each agency shall take prompt steps to expand access to information by making it available online in open formats.[/quote] [8] http://www.adjb.net/post/Microsoft-Fails-the-Standards-Test.aspx Alex Brown - Convener of the ISO Ballot Resololution Meeting for the OOXML standard and co-designer of an XML validator for documents. [9] http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/ Doug Mahugh - Lead Standards Professional on the Microsoft Office Interoperability team. [10] http://documentation.openoffice.org/ -- Michael --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
