ubuntu-users Digest, Vol 24, Issue 154

[Alan Mckinnon]

On Wed, 2006-08-23 at 16:40 +0200, Alain Muls wrote:
> > It's no different in South Africa, we were discussing this last week
> on
> > the Open ICDL list - teachers are very resistant to changing to Open
> > Source apps. It's not that they are anti-OSS, it's more that they
> don't
> > want to change from the status quo. Frankly, they couldn't give a
> rat's
> > ass about the philosophy and politics of closed vs open source, they
> > have 30 or more kids to get through a program and a year to do it
> in. SO
> > asking them to change the IT platform is somewhat like someone
> > arbitrarily trying to get you to agree to move house to an equally
> > perfectly good one two blocks over, all for no benefit to you that
> you
> > can see. You'd resist it, same as the teachers are doing.
> 
> They do not have to change the platform (Windows -> Linux) but they
> could 
> (quite easily) change from Word/Excel to swriter/scalc and ALL kids
> could 
> have the same program in their native language whatever plaform they
> are on.

That is precisely what the OpenICDL people are trying to achieve and
meeting resistance on, and most folk involved are wondering why the
teachers don't like OpenOffice.

Remember, they are not resisting OpenOffice or OSS.
They are resisting change.

They'd probably also resist a change from blue walls to red ones...

alan