I worked in a school district in IT and the problem is that most teachers in that district use the computers as baby sitters and have no real interest in learning anything deeper about computers. I realize there are alot of good teachers out there, but to do anthing besides shoving a cd into the computer and follow someone's canned teaching of Word, Excel or Powerpoint would would of been a miracle.
I think that government, where I work now, would benefit greatly from free software as well. Cost is definitely important for the same reasons, but I think that Open Standards is a more important reason. Here's an example: I had created a Powerpoint in Office 2000 on VOIP and recently had updated to Office XP and was going to speak at a conference and went to use it and realized the rendering engine would not display the jpeg's correctly. I booted into Linux and used OpenOffice instead, which worked flawlessly. Saved by free software. This is an extremely important issue. Our government is saving files in propietary formats and that should cause for us to have concern. We have no assurance 5 years from now the accessability of those documents. Open standards requirement would resolve this issue.
Another reason is security. Using both propietary and free systems at work I find computers running a free OS is definitely more secure and stable.
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Posted by: RoHart on November 09, 2003 11:40 AMI think that government, where I work now, would benefit greatly from free software as well. Cost is definitely important for the same reasons, but I think that Open Standards is a more important reason. Here's an example: I had created a Powerpoint in Office 2000 on VOIP and recently had updated to Office XP and was going to speak at a conference and went to use it and realized the rendering engine would not display the jpeg's correctly. I booted into Linux and used OpenOffice instead, which worked flawlessly. Saved by free software. This is an extremely important issue. Our government is saving files in propietary formats and that should cause for us to have concern. We have no assurance 5 years from now the accessability of those documents. Open standards requirement would resolve this issue.
Another reason is security. Using both propietary and free systems at work I find computers running a free OS is definitely more secure and stable.
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