Re: [school-discuss] Open Source in Government and Schools

["Robert G. Rittenhouse" <rob@cs1.mcm.edu>]

Tom Adelstein wrote:

> The academic promotion with Sun for StarOffice 7 allows schools to get 
> the entire suite for free and offer it to all students, faculty and 
> administration as well as parents, relatives, etc.
>
> If you use OpenOffice you may want to switch to SO7 as it provides 
> higher quality desktop rendering and many addons.
We signed up for this a year or two ago. It was a bit of a pain at the 
time but that has changed now. If you were put off by the paperwork 
previously you can certainly go for it now.

StarOffice and OpenOffice have a bit of a leapfrog relationship. 
OpenOffice is where new development takes place which SO later picks 
up.  SO 7 was just introduced so the basic features are competitive and 
SO has some addons OO doesn't.  It's like the old Mozilla/Netscape 
relationship (except this one works) and similar to the one with Eclipse 
and IBM's development tools.
--
Rob R.