+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>LibreOffice, Wikipedia, Openstreetmap, Iceweasel (Mozilla Firefox),
+KMail, Gimp, Inkscape - and of course the Linux Kernel (not only on
+PC, Laptop, Mobile, but also our SAT receiver)</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+<p><ol>
+
+<li>Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
+people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
+difference between proprietary software products, and free software
+developing.</li>
+
+<li>Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
+there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
+licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
+privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
+share among German Skolelinux schools.</li>
+
+<li>Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
+trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
+decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.</li>
+
+<li>Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
+free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
+general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
+shared world wide (school books e.g.).</li>
+
+<li>Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
+office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
+need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.</li>
+
+<li>Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.</li>
+
+<li>Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
+for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
+Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials. And
+keep sending documents in ODF formats.</li>
+
+</ol></p>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
+
+
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
+ <div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html">The cost of ODF and OOXML</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 26th May 2012
+ </div>
+ <div class="body">
+ <p>I just come across a blog post from Glyn Moody reporting the
+claimed cost from Microsoft on requiring ODF to be used by the UK
+government. I just sent him an email to let him know that his
+assumption are most likely wrong. Sharing it here in case some of my
+blog readers have seem the same numbers float around in the UK.</p>
+
+<p><blockquote> <p>Hi. I just noted your
+<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm">http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/04/does-microsoft-office-lock-in-cost-the-uk-government-500-million/index.htm</a>
+comment:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>"They're all in Danish, not unreasonably, but even
+with the help of Google Translate I can't find any figures about the
+savings of "moving to a flexible two standard" as claimed by the
+Microsoft email. But I assume it is backed up somewhere, so let's take
+it, and the £500 million figure for the UK, on trust."
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>I can tell you that the Danish reports are inflated. I believe it is
+the same reports that were used in the Norwegian debate around 2007,
+and Gisle Hannemyr (a well known IT commentator in Norway) had a look
+at the content. In short, the reason it is claimed that using ODF
+will be so costly, is based on the assumption that this mean every
+existing document need to be converted from one of the MS Office
+formats to ODF, transferred to the receiver, and converted back from
+ODF to one of the MS Office formats, and that the conversion will cost
+10 minutes of work time for both the sender and the receiver. In
+reality the sender would have a tool capable of saving to ODF, and the
+receiver would have a tool capable of reading it, and the time spent
+would at most be a few seconds for saving and loading, not 20 minutes
+of wasted effort.</p>
+
+<p>Microsoft claimed all these costs were saved by allowing people to
+transfer the original files from MS Office instead of spending 10
+minutes converting to ODF. :)</p>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff