On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 10:36:12PM -0000, Bruce Miller wrote:
<snip>
I have reservations too, about Sun Microsystems making a monoploly of my network and taking over where Microsoft left off either. I wouldn't want to invest curriculum development and good time into possibly buggy and soley office based moves forwards either.
I'm not too sure where you get the idea that Sun will monopolise your network. Gnome is GPL (but going to be used by Sun as their standard Solaris desktop), StarOffice is a Sun thing but freely available; OpenOffice on the other hand is GPL AFAIK.
Sun's primary business is selling hardware, software is just something they need to throw in to make their hardware work.
NFS was developed by Sun as was Java & they've got a pretty good track record of publishing the specs and allowing others to re-implement.
As was NIS, even though BT forced them to change the name all the files kept their original names :)
Microsoft on the other hand don't publish specs & don't allow others to re-implement which is why you're now locked-in & your XP network
Where they do publish specs they may be incomplete or slanted to migrate something else to Microsoft stuff. e.g. IIRC the specification of the Word format is aimed at being able to produce something word can read, rather than being able to read something Word has written...
will cost you an arm and a leg in licensing costs and maintenance.
I quite understand your desire to go with the flow though, not upset the apple-cart etc. and spend the budget.
I guess we'll just have to keep pressing until our Stalinist Leader T.B wheels out another 10 yr plan with instructions for schools to
He's probably too busy planning his next trip somewhere else in the world...
stop wasting money on proprietary software & use open source.
-- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763