Matt Woodward’s posterous

Matt Woodward’s posterous

Matthew Woodward  //  * CFML, Grails, and Java Developer
* Principal IT Specialist, US Senate
* Open BlueDragon Steering Committee Member
* All-Around Geek

 
Oct 6 / 8:57am

Unixmen - Schools start to move to OpenOffice

by Matthew Woodward
The switch to OpenOffice also helps to save costs, that can now be used to purchase new IT equipment, the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency (ITST), adds today in a statement.

The Lyngby-Taarbæk municipality needed to purchase six hundred new school PCs to replace outdated computers, explains Jens Kjellerup, head of the administration's IT department. By moving to open source, the municipality saved an amount equal to 25 percent of the amount needed for the new hardware. "Moving to open source paid for about 150 of these computers."

via unixmen.com

Awesome. Get 'em started early.

In all seriousness, it makes me ill to see schools losing teachers while they're shoveling millions Microsoft's way. So it's nice to see schools (in other countries, but hey it's a start) looking more globally at things instead of assuming that paying for Office and Windows licenses is just the cost of doing business.

1 comment

Oct 06, 2009
 said...
I am a member of the LDS church, and recently (from my limited perspective), it appears that the church moved to OO.o for all of the local chapel PCs. The reason I said "from my limited perspective" is because I have only really seen one local PC. But I think that they just image these PCs from Salt Lake City, so I'm guessing all units got this change and not just me. If they all did, we are talking about around 28,000 PCs. Before this the local PCs had MS Works. In my opinion, for a non-profit organization, a move away from Works to OO.o makes perfect sense.

Also, since the LDS church is a global organization, for language reasons it makes sense to move to OO.o. We have church members in some pretty obscure "markets", wherein MS probably doesn't want to localize their software. I don't have any facts, but I'd wager that OO.o has more localization than Works.

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