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

MS is giving this solution to India free of cost!

Kannan


On 24/04/13 7:35 PM, Marc Paré wrote:
> 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

--
Bridging digital divide through FOSS, Spoken Tutorials and Aakash
http://aakashlabs.org/builds/genesis-reprint.pdf
http://spoken-tutorial.org/CSI.pdf
http://spoken-tutorial.org/What-is-a-Spoken-Tutorial-2-Minute-Video-English
http://scilab.in/Textbook_Companion_Project
http://scilab.in/Lab_Migration_Project


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