[Linux-aus] Academics and FLOSS

[Glen Turner]

On Fri, 2007-05-25 at 09:51 +1000, Andrew Swinn wrote:

> Outside of the IT sector of Universities I think there still is a large 
> chunk of people unaware of the alternatives, especially in the student 
> population.

Computer science and engineering is almost totally Linux. And
maybe that will be the way forever -- in many trades there's
a division between the philosophy and tools used by professionals
and the junk used by amateurs.

> Microsoft definitely are making waves in the academic arena again. Their 
> offer to University students to purchase MS Office Ultimate for $75 is a 
> good example. A pretty good deal to most people and this sort of thing 
> is pretty hard to compete against.

It's a good deal, the price neatly matches the hassle to students of
retraining into the competing OpenOffice.org.

But it's also a good deal for Microsoft. $75 per first year uni student.
Marginal cost basically zero, since the unis are funding the download
server and putting it on their internet.

> I am about to start a double degree with Charles Sturt University next 
> year and have been recently looking into the Open Source vs Proprietary 
> options when it comes to academic study (I am currently completing the 
> bridging course they offer so I am invloved with CSU now). This EndNote 
> program is the one big thorn it seems. I can't comment on it too much as 
> I have never installed it. CSU have recently moved to using EndNote as 
> their preferred piece of software in replacement to ProCite. There are 
> various referencing tools for Linux but I have only just started looking 
> at them.

It really depends on your field, as unis tend to use what practitioners
in the field use. For essay-oriented and business subjects, that's
Microsoft.

OOo has a long-running citation project
  http://bibliographic.openoffice.org/
but it's still not resulting in shipped code.  I'm not sure that Sun
realise how much EndNote ties academics and students to MS Office.

Of the alternatives, Pybliographer seems to be the one to keep
your eye on.

> One of the biggest hurdles for me is lack of ODF support. As I am 
> studying by distance education while I stay at home raising our child I 
> am expected to submit assessments online. The problem with CSU at 
> present is that they support very few formats for online submission. As 
> you can guess Word is one of those. OpenOffice can export to Word 
> format, but it is still not 100% compatible. The last couple of 
> assessments I have submitted have been futzed up so I have decided to 
> print hard copies in future and post them in.

I find the .PDF export works better than the .DOC export if you need
fidelity.  PDF also pulls in the fonts. Forgetting to ship fonts
with your ODF document is a bit of a trap for young players, but
conversely shipping fonts is a nightmare for the document recipient
(you shouldn't trust fonts from just anyone).

Do hassle CSU about ODF support. You'll often find such things are
supported within IT, but don't get away because of a seeming lack
of student demand.

> At the end of the day we really only have the free as in speech aspect 
> as the defining feature of our open source software. In the short term 
> the dollar cost figure is negligible/non-existant. I think the number 
> one thing to play on it promoting the openness of things like the ODF 
> format aand how they will protect our academic knowledge banks for 
> decades to come.

I think that under-rates the achievement of FOSS programmers.  I use
Linux, Mac and Windows and more and more often Linux is the easier
one to use to get the job done; the major downfall being the
difficulty of systems administration for a single desktop.

Also, the package management is a strong win. You want software, you
just click on it. And it stays up-to-date with no fuss.

Increasingly, the tools cooperate rather than compete. I often draw a
rough diagram in Dia, add bells-and-whistles in Inkscape, drop the
result into a ODF document, and export to PDF.  All without any loss
in fidelity.

Cheers, Glen