[libreoffice-marketing] Re: Indian academic institutions forced to use MS Office

Le 24/04/13 08:34 AM, Charles-H. Schulz a écrit :
> Dear Kannan,
>
> I think your question is: do we have an online version of Libreoffice ?
> Full answer, we will, there's a prototype anyone can run (instructions
> on the wiki), we just need resources to make sure we have a fully
> dedicated team to fully develop it.
> This LibreOffice OnLine is not distinct from LibreOffice software itself
> (you can configure it as a server platform) and anyone with a reasonably
> sized server will be able to use it and have several users run it in
> their browser.
>
> If your question is : do we have a whole FOSS desktop stack, we don't,
> and we're not looking to have one. I agree with your latest comments
> though, and I again invite interested people/teams who are in contact
> with existing decision makers in ICT and education to ping me and we'll
> open a private mailing list for advocacy/policy coordination.
>
> best,
> Charles.

Taking as example, our school system in Canada.

I have been a FOSS advocate for over a decade if not more and also sat 
on a committee called ESC (Elementary Software Committee) with my school 
board (for even longer) where we evaluated software destined to 
elementary school use. Our ESC committee also worked cooperatively with 
our IT staff making sure that any acquisitions did not take down our 
servers nor compromised them. In short, our ESC in conjunction with the 
IT staff were pretty well the deciding group for software purchases and 
adoptions.

At present, we do use some FOSS software but not LibreOffice. As we are 
all aware, moving to LibreOffice in some geographical regions is quite 
difficult due to the MSO penetration within these markets.

From my point of view, the only way that we could budge the elephant, 
would be to question the financial reasoning and logic behind using an 
expensive suite which often will cost between $35-50/seat per module (in 
Canada and most likely in the US). As most board of educations (in 
Canada) are financially accountable to a publicly elected School BoD, 
then our main option would be of demonstrating publicly the fact that, 
feature for feature LibreOffice offers the same educational advantages 
as MSO. If it were demonstrated publicly that LibreOffice at the primary 
level offered the same identical benefits as MSO BUT without its 
expensive cost, and, if we could demonstrate the LibreOffice suite was 
easily integrated on their server stacks, then, public pressure would 
mount with demands to the school boards of adopting the LibreOffice 
suite as their main teaching tool at the primary level.

If we were to mount a public ad campaign, in national, provincial and 
community newspapers, for example, starting with the most populous 
province in Canada, we could most likely start a wave of LibreOffice 
adoption throughout that province. Once the wave starts in a populous 
province, it then become difficult to stem this wave from propagating to 
other provinces and of even crossing borders.

The purpose of the ads would be to get people to discuss in public and 
help mount popular opinion on the savings of millions of dollars from 
unnecessary software.

We should definitely be looking at simplifying our cloud version of 
LibreOffice so that educational institutions have this on their list of 
options. Most of these institutions have their own stacks up and working 
already and this is what MSO is hoping to lock them into.

I don't believe that this strategy is anything new to MSO as they are 
most likely expecting it and hoping that we are languishing enough for 
them to lock their client base into their cloud services.

And, yes, MS is most likely on these mailing lists and monitoring any 
mention of MSO and possible strategic plans being implemented on our part.

Cheers,

Marc


--
Marc Paré
Marc@MarcPare.com
http://www.parEntreprise.com
parEntreprise.com Supports OpenDocument Formats (ODF)
parEntreprise.com Supports http://www.LibreOffice.org


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