Re: [edlug] Scottish Executive: Staroffice

["Bob Kerr" <robertnkerr@xxx.xxx.xxx>]

Thank you for letting us know, It is good to be able to have someone who can 
clarify what it is like inside the workings of the Scottish Executive.

You are right StarOffice is not Open source, I also remember lobbying the 
Scottish Education Licencing head some 6-8 months ago about OpenOffice. They 
generally were not interested in OpenOffice because the Licence for 
StarOffice for Educational facilities is free. There is also issues 
considering migration and retraining which is of great concern. I am 
guessing that the orginal article  is just pointing to a mechanism which 
will hopefully make the job of getting licences easier for Educational 
Establishments. I cannot see any migration to opensource for most of the 
Scottish parliament agencies in the near future. When I was working in 
Polygram which eventually became Universal Music Group, it took 5 years to 
plan consolidation and migration from windows 3.1 to win98SE and there are 
still companies in South America that use windows 3.1 because of some old 
DOS databases. It is incredibly complicated

However what is interesting is that it signals awareness of StarOffice and 
opens up the possibility of giving OpenOffice to the students for their home 
computers. Even better TheOpenCD. This gives people the awareness of choice 
and will let a much larger proportion of people the possiblity of learning 
those skills. It would also be very financially beneficial to the people of 
Scotland and could literaly save them the price of the new parliament 
building. If we manage to get CD duplicators to some schools it would be 
relatively easy and cheap to provice openoffice(theOpenCD) to the 
pupils.(and soon in Gaelic too)

Your thoughts are very much appreciated as it is only by knowing the facts 
that we can truely judge the mood and situation within the inner workings of 
Parliamentry groups.

Cheers

Bob

> From: Robert Hart <robert.hart@xxx.xxx.xxx>
> To: edlug@xxx.xxx.xxx
> Subject: Re: [edlug] Scottish Executive: Staroffice
> Date: Sat, 08 May 2004 14:36:46 +0100
>
>
> OK I'll bite...
>
> First, let me declare up front that I work for the Scottish Executive in
> their core ICT department. This department provides ICT services for the
> Scottish Executive. So, this article will have nothing to do with the IT
> department. My guess is that it was done by the Education Department.
>
> Next - lets get our facts straight about the various government
> departments Scotland:
>
> When devolution happened, the Scottish Office disapeared. It was
> replaced by the Scotland Office (which is effectively the Westminster
> Department and is basically there for liason with Westminster and to
> provide support for the Scottish Secretary) and the Scottish Executive.
> This is the executive arm of devolved Scottish government. They do the
> public consultation and policy research for Scottish Ministers, and then
> facilitate the delivery of policy - usually by dishing out money to the
> appropriate public bodies. The Scottish Parliament provide support and
> services for the MSP's. So, since the new parliament building is being
> built by the Scottish Parliament for the Scottish Parliament, then how
> will that affect the budget of the Scottish Executive? - especially
> since it is the Scottish Executive that gives them their money.
>
> Phew! Now, the Scottish Executive use various database systems. The
> technology chosen is dependant on the project and the supplier of the
> solution. So, no, the Executive is not doing a wholesale Access database
> migration to other platforms.
>
> The desktop infrastructure for the Scottish Executive is Microsoft.
> There is no Staroffice or openoffice on any Executive desktop.
>
> OK - now lets get back to the article. It is about Star Office. The last
> time I looked it was not an open source product, and Openoffice was not
> mentioned once in the article. Sun seem to be pretty schitzephrenic
> about their attitude towards and promotion of OSS (check
> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040426120752778 ) and I'm
> willing to bet that the deal was made more on exonomics. Also note that
> the article says that it is still up to the individual school to decide
> to use the product - so it may never happen in a large scale.
>
> Don't get me wrong - this is good news, and guys, don't feel put down by
> my rantings - I don't know about the IT of your company :-). However the
> misconceptions stacking up on top of each other was starting to get to
> me (although there are one or two of my misconceptions in here too - so
> shoot me down folks:-) ).
>
> Roebrt

_________________________________________________________________
Check out the coupons and bargains on MSN Offers! http://youroffers.msn.com

-
----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can find the EdLUG mailing list FAQ list at:
http://www.edlug.org.uk/list_faq.html