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Re: [school-discuss] More Progress!



On Thursday 06 February 2003 09:22 pm, Jim Anderson wrote:
> I then said to her that this application is
> absolutely free to use and deploy as she saw fit.  Her jaw just dropped
> and her eyes popped out.  "Free!?"  "Yes, Lucy, free."

Funny, isn't it? I gave a presentation on OSS to a local government advisory 
committee, including on OpenOffice.org, but it seems the penny just hadn't 
dropped, for some reason. All of the presentations were made on MS-PowerPoint 
on a Win2k laptop. I mentioned, right at the end, that I'd built this one in 
OpenOffice.org Impress and never checked it against Microsoft's software, 
just SaveAs'ed it and here it was. And got a similar reaction: raised 
eyebrows, blinking, sitting back in seat, turning to look at each other as if 
I'd just grown a third eye. Just to make the point, I explained that the 
backgrounder they had sitting in front of them, printed out from Word by the 
office staff, had been written in OpenOffice.org Writer.

I felt like - but did not - saying "HELLO? What have I been spouting on about 
for the last half hour? IS ANYONE HOME?" Anyway, the committee's still 
deliberating on that one, at least some of them positively, and they got 
another serve from Harry McNally, about whom I hope you'll hear a lot more 
soon. His missus, Jacqueline, is carrying a lot of weight for the OpenOffice 
organisation, too. Harry focussed a lot on `unexpected' Linux benefits like 
lowered risk. The local Microsoft rep was not pleased, can't imagine why. (-:

Cheers; Leon