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The question nobody asked that Ghana teacher

The Internet is going wild about a Ghana teacher who is teaching how to pass a Microsoft Word examination test using only a blackboard. As far as I can tell, however, so far nobody asked him (and the Ghana government, of course) this specific question:

Pesaro, Microsoft and OpenOffice: the consequences

A few days ago I summarized the most questionable or uncertain points of the software odissey of the City of Pesaro, saying that I’d also post questions and consequences, both for the City and Open Source advocates, not mentioned yet in this story. For Pesaro, the road forward has little or nothing to do with the initial topic, that is Open Source Software in Public Administration. The advocates, instead, should rethink some of their strategies. Let’s start from Pesaro, but what follows applies to practically every city.

Microsoft vs OpenOffice in Pesaro: first, let's recap

Microsoft vs OpenOffice in Pesaro: first, let's recap /img/pesaro-retrocessione.png

Pesaro is a town of about 100 thousands people on the northern adriatic coast of Italy. Its Public Administration has been facing lots of critics from Free/Open Source software supporters because, in the last five years, it changed twice the same, important part of its ICT infrastructure. Both those changes bring consequences and open issues, both for the critics and for Pesaro, that have had little or no coverage at all so far, especially outside Italy (1). Before talking about them, however, it is necessary to summarize what happened.

The Free Software icon that we need the most. Fifteen years ago

Today, while cleaning up old backups, I found a text file named as this post, which I saved on November 17th, 2000, but never used. Cannot remember what I was planning to do with it, but here it goes. A bit naive, surely dated (just look at which Free Software companies I was suggesting to go for help…) but still interesting, considering how things stand today. Here it goes, unchanged:

The correct way to use and advocate OO.o and the real reason to do it

(this is something I wrote in 2007. Everywhere you read “OO.o” you can (and should) replace it with “Apache OpenOffice or Libre Office”. See the bottom of the page for the origin and history of the text)

Many people, schools and small businesses use OO.o only because