Why not OpenOffice?
During the last few weeks I have had a number of conversations with various individuals regarding the use of open source applications in both schools and in the business place. Let's take OpenOffice as an example. First let me say that I have been using some form of open source word processor for better than six years now and have only found a hand full of documents that I had to work hard to get them to open correctly. Given a few quick tweaks, less than 30 seconds, and most documents are just fine. Given the current economic downturn and with OpenOffice's ability to export to pdf, and in new versions the ability to edit pdfs (in a roundabout way), I am still amazed that decision makers shy away from even looking at OpenOffice.
I recently met a gentleman who made a valient attempt to help a public agency save a sizable chunk of change by moving to OpenOffice for their productivity suite and to Zimbra for email. He had done his homework and presented the idea to management and was turned down completely. Now mind you, for this agancy it could save over a million dollars per year. Given the wholesale dismissal of his idea, he took it to a state legislator who then began asking questions. This young man was then accused of lobbying by his employer. To make a long story shorter, this young man has now voluntarily resigned, in part, due to the political firestorm that the mere suggestion of using OpenOffice caused.
While at church yesterday, I had a conversation with an educator who is very frustrated with the amount of cuts occuring in her district. We got talking about OpenOffice, which by the way she had never heard of, and she was flabbergasted to find out that it was totally free. She asked if it was different than Word and I said not by much, and that I had been using it for years. The thought of riffing staff before even looking at something like OpenOffice just sickened her.
So my question is this: why would a company riff staff rather than look at open source solutions that could potentially save a few jobs? If somebody could explain this to me I would really appreciate it. I am now jumping off my soapbox for the day.
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November 8, 2009 - 8:56am
#1
Thanks for taking the time
Thanks for taking the time to discuss this, I feel strongly about it and love learning more on this topic. If possible, as you gain expertise, would you mind updating your blog with more information? It is extremely helpful and beneficial to your readers.
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November 18, 2009 - 12:20am
#2
Working on the more posts thing
Hello Ronnix, I really appreciate your comments. Once of my goals, now that my personal life is returning to some kind of normalcy, is to spend more time posting about free and open source software and the impact it can have on teaching and learning. If I appear to be wandering again, please ping me and rattle my chain.
September 26, 2009 - 1:30am
#3
OpenOffice vs. Microsoft
With the old adage "If it seems to good to be true, it probably is." Well, with OpenOffice that is not the case. I myself have used it for about three years. Matter of fact, I use the Oxygen OpenOffice version. And I am very happy with it.
For years Microsoft has been the bull in the office suite business. They have been strong-arming businesses for a long time. For example, Let say a company has 100 computers with Microsoft Office on them that company has to pay them an annual volume license for all of the software on those computers. With the price of Microsoft Office at $399 per copy, thats $39,900, each year! And that is not including the cost of the Operating systems.
That sum of $39,900 probably could hire a couple of part-timers to come in an install OpenOffice.
November 2, 2009 - 9:18am
#4
Clip Art and Open Office
I have never seen anyone really address the issue of the clip art available in OO (I have found that Oxygen OO is an improvement over just OO). Here is my issue: Having elementary (including Kdgn) students insert clip art. I know everyone says - find a copyright free website and copy/paste. I just don't find that practical for K-2 students (and don't advocate it for the rest) Is there something in OO that will let you search for clip art like in Office. As far as the mechanics of using OO - no problem with that - similar enough for basic work (although printing in Impress can be an issue)
Thanks for any input anyone may have!
August 19, 2009 - 4:32am
#5
Who will support,configure
Who will support,configure fix and run it??
August 20, 2009 - 3:22am
#6
Support
Check out this post for answers to your questions regarding support etc...
http://k12opensourcehelp.com/blogs/randy-orwin/open-source-support-models
July 15, 2009 - 2:18pm
#7
Is there a guarantee that it
Is there a guarantee that it will ALWAYS be free? Well, once a program adopts an OSI certified open-source license, it would be a violation of the license for anyone to try to revoke it and make it commercial.
That's the beauty about open-source, and one of the things that makes it truly open.
Even if the company tried to do that with OpenOffice.org, someone would take the code and fork it (start maintaining it from then on out), and there's nothing Sun Microsystems, Novell or Oracle could do about it. Again, though, those companies won't do that because they can't.
And in terms of support... there's just as much guarantee there will be support for OpenOffice.org next year as there is with Microsoft Office or Corel WordPerfect. The main difference between the two is that if Microsoft dies, so does Office.
Besides, most people only use a subset of any office suite anyway. I think training, in most cases anyway, is negligible. We switched to OpenOffice.org at my employer, and it was a piece of cake - even for the less-than-savvy ones.
July 23, 2009 - 3:38pm
#8
Always free
Thanks anonymous for your input regarding the question as to open source always being free. Your clarification is very good. I would like to know who you are though. You may contact me directly via the contact form on the site if you you don't want your name out there. Thanks again for your response!
June 1, 2009 - 2:39pm
#9
Retraining Staff/faculty
Before I begin, thanks for adding a comment to the post.
First, let me say that I completely understand your point. Second let me say that I have never said that open source was entirely free. As you point out, there are always support and training costs whether you use a proprietary or open source application. With open source the bottom line is that you don't have to pay for the software.
On a different note, having done a conversion to open office, for the most part there really isn't much, if any training needed at all. It is a word processor for crying out loud. As long as one understands the concepts behind word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software, it is pretty easy to use any of the three, other than if you are a power Excel user and then a transition can be a bit tricky. For basic users though, the learning curve is nearly flat. Besides, if you were doing an upgrade to Office 2007, that is a more difficult switch than to OpenOffice because the UI is so different and you then have to do retraining any way.
Most IT shops that I have talked to don't worry about the word processor, spreadsheet or presentation applications, they fret over not having Outlook, and that is a completely different discussion entirely.
As far as your point to guaranteeing that it is always free. If the software is licensed with one of the main open source licenses then I don't think you have much to worry about. I ask you this question: How many proprietary software companies have closed their doors in the last 30 years? Did anyone think that "Oh, we shouldn't buy this software because the company might go out of business?"
As far as support, I have never said that support is always free. Let me reiterate, all of the normal operating costs of managing an IT shop don't necessarily change if you use open source applications. The difference is the software is free, which can free up funds for other kinds of things like support or keeping staff. From my perspective you have numerous different support models in the open source arena, some of which are cheaper than others. I would list them here but I think I will create a new post to elaborate on those models.
Let me briefly address your "Ads" comment. In all of my years of using open source I have never used an open source application that had ads. OpenOffice is ad free, Audacity is ad free. Moodle is ad free. Gimp is ad free. Scribus is ad free. I could go on and on. I believe that you are referring to some web 2.0 tools or certain types of freeware or shareware. Certainly, many of these contain ads, but I can honestly say that given the dozens of open source applications that I have used in the last fifteen years, none of them had ads.
January 1, 2010 - 11:11pm
#10
OpenOffice - Email
I am an a proponent of district's looking closely at open-source software as a cost savings measure for not only the district, but also for the families of the students that we are working with. With that said, I know that the main concern that my district's technology department would have with making this type of move would be the Outlook issue. They are currently working on moving from Groupwise to Outlook.
What open-source email program would you suggest that not only provides email, but also calendar features similar to Outlook?
