Hm, not entirely unreasonable points. Although I reckon that you may have been too quick to dismiss it all.<br><br>Firstly, the most important thing is to encourage open standards - ensuring that anyone, no matter what system they are using - is on a level playing field to consume content available. This surely encourages that.<br>
<br>Secondly, it's my god damn tax money - so if the government need to pay a company to write something I'd like to know that A: it's not just reinventing to wheel (or most of a pre-existing meal) and B: any custom development commissioned by the government that could possibly to useful to anyone else is available for anyone else to use in their projects. Obviously there might be certain things for which this isn't applicable.<br>
<br>Thirdly, what's so bad about OpenOffice.org that for most people it wouldn't suffice as a Microsoft Office replacement? Really? I used it (and Inkscape) to do my English coursework last year and it looked a heck of lot better than most peoples did. But, honestly - real world cases - what normal person is going to perform worse using OOo?<br>
<br>Fourthly, I would imagine that a lot of people who aren't so well off (as well as a lot of people who are) aren't geeky enough to know that all this wonderful stuff does exist, and it's all free. So if you make it commonplace in the schools you'll spread awareness of it.<br>
<br>Finally, there's a reason that Linux is considered a relatively good multi-purpose FOSS operating system. Because it is. Unlike MINIX and HURD which haven't got the development behind them to make them widely applicable to much of a user base.<br>
<br>... this is a rushed response, but I thought it'd be better out than in ^^<br><br><br>Kind Regards,<br>Christopher<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 1:08 PM, Tom French <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:spindleflax@gmail.com">spindleflax@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Interesting story, but I hope they're not planning to just switch unthinkingly to FOSS to save some cash even if the software's worse. I don't really think, for example, OOo is up to scratch. And of course, in some situations (where hopefully the gov't knows better) the fact that they have no warranty on FOSS might be a problem. While it's not happened yet as far as I know, I'm not sure how careful some of the big software is about the risk of an unscrupulous contributor introducing vulnerabilities. Still, good news for Linux and co.<br>
<br>About the petition, I'm not sure what the argument is for an entire country to massively promote a non-standard operating system to children (sounds like the kind of evil mind-share Microsoft is so often accused of having). The longer text mentions a few reasons (cost to poverty-stricken families, risk of malware, lack of locale support for bizarre languages (bizarre languages that most of our school children apparently require when being taught in a British school) and not being designed for education) but I'm not really convinced. I'm pretty sure most Linux-savvy kids can handle the bridge between their Linux box and the school's Windows ones if they really can't afford Windows at home; Windows has pretty reasonable support for British English; if you make another OS popular, malware will be made for it; I'm really not sure about the last point though. What OS are they talking about? The only one I know off the top of my head that's intended largely for education is MINIX. Perhaps that would be a good thing, since MINIX should be much more of a major FOSS operating system than the dysmal nth-place it has now. I'd sign the petition for MINIX, but not for Linux. Linux doesn't deserve any more of the spotlight.<br>
<br>Tom<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2009/2/25 Chris Burton <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:Chris@7of9b.org" target="_blank">Chris@7of9b.org</a>></span><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div>> Dunno if you've already seen this, but it makes interesting reading.<br>
><br>
> <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7910110.stm" target="_blank">http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7910110.stm</a><br>
><br>
<br>
</div>On a similar note some of you might be interested in this which came through<br>
on the LUGMasters list earlier.<br>
<a href="http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/nonMSschools/" target="_blank">http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/nonMSschools/</a><br>
<br>
ChrisB.<br>
<div><div></div><div><br>
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