Hi,
I'm the World Education Lead for the OpenOffice.org community. Couple of points. OpenOffice.org is the code base for Star Office. The only significant differences between OpenOffice.org and Star Office are:
Star Office has some minor additions such as a filter for Wordperfect and the Adabas database that OpenOffice does not include. These are relatively unimportant unless you have a specific need for them.
OpenOffice.org tends to get released with bug fixes more often, usually Star office comes out after a release of OO.o. So OO.o 1.1 was later released as Star Office 7. Both of these are significant improvements over their earlier versions. OpenOffice.org 2.0 is roadmapped for the end of 2004 and will again be very much improved.
OpenOffice.org is a community as well as a product with potential for pupils to take part in aspects such as Quality Assurance, provision of clip art and templates, marketing, CD-ROM distribution. What better way to learn than to take part in the World's biggest Open Source project.
Star Office belongs entirely to Sun Microsystems and is controlled by that company. Sun has influence in OpenOffice.org development but the ownership lies with the worldwide community. More than 20 million downloads so far.
OpenOffice.org can quite happily live alongside MS Office so why not install it on your network anyway and provide choice? OpenOffice.org 1.1 can save directly to pdf files which MS Office can't and the Drawing programme OO.o Draw is worth having for school use on its own. And you can burn as many CDs as you like for pupils to use at home without messing about with vouchers and such like. This is socially responsible because it helps prevent piracy and enables pupils without the means to buy commercial software to have the same access to ICT as everyone else with the same software available at home and at school. Government social inclusion policy.
You can download OpenOffice.org from www.openoffice.org. There are also links to CD-ROM distributors if you have a slow link. The OpenOffice.org Education Web page is at www.openoffice.org/education/schools.
You can subscribe to the OpenOffice.org education mailing list by sending a blank E-mail to educ-unsubscribe@marketing.openoffice.org
There is good support at users@openoffice.org for technical queries and its all free. You can also suggest improvements and "must have" features at discuss@openoffice.org.
There is also certification available suitable for OpenOffice.org at www.theINGOTs.org
If you want to find out more about FLOSS in general come to the FLOSSIE conference at the London Institute of Education 18th February. More details at http://www.schoolforge.org.uk/flossie/conference200402.html
Hope this helps.
I agree wholeheartedly with your position on the "microsoft tax" situation. We (a London Primary School) are replacing our MS Office Products with Star Office v7.00, as and when new machines are installed.
We have one interactive whiteboard which, again I agree, had quite a lot of novelty value. The kids certainly like operating the larger image, but I am now quite firmly of the view that the same effect can be had by equipping classrooms with a projector and decent wireless mouse/keyboard, thus effecting a saving of about GBP1,500 per class.
