[K12OSN] School board not interested in OSS

[Harish Pillay]

> Waitasec...if the Ministry of Education is purchasing the licenses, then how
> is it free of charge?  Where's the money coming from?

This is very typical.  For example, here in Singapore, the Ministry of Education
has a national license to Windows and Office which means that all schools do
not know of the real costs of using these tools.  Clever way to hide away the
numbers.

So, when you talk to principals and teachers about using OO.o, they look
puzzled. The way you should approach this is by highlighting the fact that
the school should not be teaching a particular product, but the concepts
behind it (wordprocessing, spreadsheets, presentations etc).  Second, ask
the school if the child can get a copy of Office from the school and run it
at home.  Recognize that not all children and their families can afford the
"student edition" so they might revert to unauthorized copies (I don't use
the word "piracy").  So, is the school inadvertently promoting the unauthorized
copying of software?  All of this is avoidable with open office which is
freely copyable and distributable.

Hope this helps.
-- 
Harish Pillay h.pillay at ieee.org gpg id: 746809E3
fingerprint: F7F5 5CCD 25B9 FC25 303E 3DA2 0F80 27DB 7468 09E3