[Linux-aus] Academics and FLOSS

[Andrew Swinn]

Dave Davey wrote:
> If FLOSS
> is to succeed, the missing links in an academic desktop environment
> are essential.  But identifying the problems does not achieve this.
> How do we develop the solutions?

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. But the biggest problem is free($), or close to, software 
being thrown into the academic world.

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. Any CSU student can now get a full 
Office product (for life) for $75 and they can install/use EndNote for 
free while they are students.

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.

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 have been completing a Tafe certificate this year as well and there 
has been some interest from fellow class people about my use of 
OpenOffice. They are interested, they thinks it's cool, but then they 
turn around and install MSOffice because they are free to do so.

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.


Andrew