[Wolves] OSS evangelism

[Mark Ellse]

As many of you know, we have swapped completely to OpenOffice here at 
school.

There are three key reasons why we did it:

1.   Philosophical: Not Microsoft and therefore not part of the monopoly.
2.   Financial: saved us a few pennies, but the cost for schools of MS 
software is not huge and the transition costs in time are significant.
3.   Cross-platform: can be used on Linux: see 1.
4.   Can give it away to the students.

The last one is the clincher. We can now require students to have the 
same software at home as school, unlike with MS software where there are 
many different versions about and the transition costs from an old to a 
new version in terms of both hardware and software are too.

Parents have been informed that students will be required to have OOo at 
home. We will give them a disk that they can use to install the 
software, and off they go. But it will be a big plug for OOo if a large 
number of schools followed this.

Mark Ellse