Open Source wants StarOffice for schools

By RICHARD WOOD

The newly formed New Zealand Open Source Society is pitching to get Sun Microsystems' StarOffice and its open source equivalent OpenOffice into schools.

The society believes StarOffice would be a step towards schools using the open source Linux operating system. Open Source software is free to use, modify and distribute.

The latest version of StarOffice costs around $260 through resellers but Sun plans to offer StarOffice free to educational institutions and is close to releasing its licence terms.

Minister of Education Trevor Mallard said the StarOffice licensing offer had no implications for the $10 million education deal struck with Microsoft last year.

He said StarOffice was previously free for everyone, was already used in some schools, and was supported by the Ministry of Education's ICT helpdesk.

Mallard said the Microsoft deal offered more than just a basic Office-style package. It included the Encarta Reference Suite, FrontPage Web publishing, a range of programming tools and the client access licence for Microsoft server products.

Society spokesman Peter Harrison said these areas would also be targeted when the Microsoft deal came up for renegotiation.

He said there was a large range of free alternatives to what Microsoft had provided and a special distribution of the Linux operating system would be developed for New Zealand schools with all the software they needed on a single installation. "There will be plenty of time to move all New Zealand schools to open source technologies during the current agreement period.

"This will mean the money that would have been spent on closed source products will be able to be directed to providing educational resources specifically customised for New Zealand, and developed by New Zealanders, thus keeping the money in New Zealand and benefiting the economy," said Harrison.

He said the society was not critical of the Microsoft education deal because there was no Open Source Society at the time.

"Migration to Open Source needs to be managed, with the appropriate support and training."