Fitting the battle of life

This is late coming to me as news, but Charles Arthur of the Guardian posted this tweet a few days ago:

The Guardian is said to have the largest installation of Macs in Europe, although Windows computers still use MS Office, and Google Apps for your Enterprise is also used across the board, according to a discussion on the BBC Backstage mailing list.

Anyway, I couldn’t find much more reference to this in a quick Google search and this week’s Guardian Tech hasn’t been released yet, so I don’t know if they’ll be making reference to it there. Still, 1,000+ installs of OpenOffice must not only save the GMG a tidy sum in these difficult economic terms, but also shows just how far open-source technology has come, for such a large organisation to drop a well-supported MS product in favour of it. This, of course, follows large installs of Ubuntu in the French public sector and elsewhere – I sense, perhaps, a tide slowly turning.

[Update: I've found a couple more links on this, including one from March 2009 in the paper itself stating that "This paper is a recent convert to OpenOffice", although another that confirms the move to OpenOffice but quotes "Andy Beale, technology director of enterprise operations at GNM" as saying that "We’re promoting [Google Docs] as the primary productivity application“, which takes away some of the importance of the OpenOffice move.]

The one thing every student needs is access to a word-processor. Yes, there are cluster rooms, but these are dull and dreary places to work at the best of times. At the worst, you can’t even log on because the server load is too high. Rubbish. Use your own. The problem is, the most basic version of MS Office 2007 costs £73.48 at time of writing, and that’s a lot of money for a student to stump up. In fact, by using the free OpenOffice you save that entire amount, which is equivalent to:

• 43 pints of lager at my student union (which means that, given I’m in London, this will be higher elsewhere) with some change for a couple of packets of crisps
• more than 90 songs on iTunes (we won’t get into that discussion here, this is for illustration only!) [Edit: this could soon be even more songs if this BBC article is right]
• 54 pints of Sainsbury’s semi-skimmed milk (4 pint bottle). That makes a lot of cups of tea.

My nan used to say, if you look after the pennies the pounds will look after themselves. I’m saying, if you look after that £75, you can buy some very useful items instead of bloated, proprietary nonsense.