James,
 I work at Monash (in ITS). I wasn't involved with the below, but I can well understand how it happened. I presume this was via a global email to students? In general, all groups try to limit the number of global messages they send (otherwise students either get annoyed or ignore them!). So despite the wording of the message below, I suspect the intent is "We don't generally send out global messages unless we're prompted to (for various reasons)"

As others have suggested, there are still a number of things you can do:
1. Your student assocation (they are campus based) will have an Education representative. This person sits on a number of committee with senior policy makers. They can represent your views on this issue.
2. ITS' approach - you can talk to the people who draft these messages and ask them to include a note about OpenOffice next time. With a little bit of work you can track down the right person to talk to :-)
3. Personal activism - as you are doing, stick up posters, tell your friends, start an email campaign of your own, make a facebook group, put a slide up on the whiteboard before the start of your class, ...!
4. Start (or get involved with) an open source/IT club. Offer to do free Linux installs, free OpenOffice installs, etc. - help the people who might not be able to do this themselves. As I recall, student clubs can get financial support for their activities in proportion to their members, so this could be a good way to grow your activism efforts.

In any case - good luck, and thanks for caring, and not just caring, but doing! :-)

kind regards,
Nathan

James Collier <james.collier412@gmail.com> wrote:> 
> Thanks for your advice everyone.
> Immediately after sending my request to this mailing list I contacted
> Monash IT Services by email:
> 
> "
> I've received emails regarding an offer by Microsoft of it's Office Suite
> at a low price to students.
> I wonder if you would mind also informing students of Free and Open
> Source
> office suites that are available for FREE and of an equal quality to the
> Microsoft product but without it's terrible restrictions!
> Free Office Suites such as Open Office.org have the added bonus of
> supporting the Open Document Format, a standard format for electronic
> office documents, ratified by the International Standards Organisation
> (ISO/IEC 26300:2006). A standard which MS Office does not support.
> 
> For your reference:
> 
> ISO Standard
> http://tinyurl.com/2wk6hs
> 
> Wikipedia Ref
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
> 
> OpenOffice.org
> http://www.openoffice.org/
> 
> KOffice
> http://www.koffice.org/
> 
> Google Docs
> http://www.docs.google.com
> 
> IBM Lotus Symphony
> http://symphony.lotus.com
> 
> Thankyou for your time,
> James Collier
> "
> 
> This morning I received the following response:
> 
> "
> Hi James,
> 
> We thank you for your concern however monash do not advertise such
> products
> on there own accord. It is companies such as Microsoft who approach
> Monash
> and though Monash are allowed to advertise there products.
> 
> We are closing this call for now, but if you have any further queries,
> please reply to this e-mail quoting the Request Number listed above so
> that we can reopen your call.
> "
> 
> David Lloyd > May I suggest a reason why the free software community
> dislike non-free licenses? Because they cheat users! They cheat us, we
> provide each other with the 4 basic freedoms of the GNU GPL. Non-free
> licenses remove freedoms.
> So let me close with a question to you: Why shouldn't we fight for our
> freedom? www.gnu.org
> 
> Once again, thanks to everyone else. I do intend to do something about
> this. I'm certainly not happy with the reply I received.
> I'll be printing some posters hopefully this weekend.
> 
> James Collier
> 
> 
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