Apologies to Dotan. I don't mean to divert attention from his thread but I felt it might be better to open up a new thread on this related matter. Hopefully a listmember from the Netherlands may be able to shed light on this matter.
A couple of weeks ago I was an invited speaker at a linguistics conference in Paris. At the end of the conference the organisers, who are based in the Netherlands (the actual conference changes venue each year), announced that the proceedings of the conference would be published and participants were encouraged to submit their papers for publication. It was stated that only MSWord and TeX submissions would be accepted. Since I am a linux user, MSWord is not an option for me. Yes, yes, I know I can save it as a MSWord .doc file but then my diagrammes, tables, and other fancy stuff I use don't survive the conversion very well. The files must be editable so exporting as a .pdf file is not an option either. Finally, I don't use TeX. So as an OOo user it looked like I was being left out in the cold. I wrote to the organisers asking if I could submit my contribution in .odt format and received this response "...Untill now, we only accepted word and tex submissions for the ...proceedings. The reason is mainly that the ICT department of our home institutions do not allow us to use Open Office." I've removed any identifiers of the conference and the institutions in order to spare the organisers any embarrassment. The institutions in question are all in the Netherlands. Is there any Dutch academic reading this who can enlighten us about this policy. I can't imagine why an ICT (IT?) department would forbid installing Openoffice on their computers. I thanked the organisers for the information and then received this message, "The last time I checked about open office with our IT-department was two years ago when they didn't allow it. After your email, I checked whether they changed their policy for open source software since then. And guess what, the IT department's open source software policy has changed (to my surprise). Momentarily, they are studying how to implement it, with the intent to replace most proprietary software with open source alternatives over the following years (which is probably the result of legislation coming effect next year in Holland). If we want to use open office in the mean time, we can do so after applying for a written permission." Well, there's a ray of hope but I still don't understand why Openoffice was forbidden in Holland before now. But it does pay to write to these people. Dotan was right. Cheers, Jonathan -- Registerd Linux user #445917 at http://counter.li.org/ Please do not send me copies of list mail. I read the lists. Thanks! --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
