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They do it in France as well and in many other countries. The cost is
one argument, but then there can be other arguments on costs as well.
This being said, there are plenty of policy arguments to counter that.

best,
Charles.

Le mercredi 24 avril 2013 à 20:26 +0530, Kannan Moudgalya a écrit :
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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-- 
Charles-H. Schulz
Co-Founder & Director, The Document Foundation,
Zimmerstr. 69, 10117 Berlin, Germany
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