Re: [Hampshire] Major vote of confidence for Linux

On 10/02/2008, Ciemon Dunville <ciemon@???> wrote:
> Something similar is happening in the British Army too.
>
> Bowman is the new digitised battlefield radio that has recently been
> bought into service. I learned to my surprise, about a month ago, that
> someone on the project has put OpenOffice on the system as the office
> package. I've yet to find out who or why but this is massive.

The decision to use OpenOffice on Bowman was not a cost based decision.
As Bowman is a radio system, bandwidth is valuable, and OpenOffice
simply has smaller document files than MS Office so is obviously the
better choice. Also, the functional use of the office application was
for a fairly specific set to features, and openoffice provided all the
required features, so MS Office had no advantage feature wise.

>
> Why? Because the forces are seriously skint, with cuts happening
> everywhere, and the IT guys are listening. Not only do we need to get
> used to "operational software" when we're not on operations, but we
> need to be seen to be saving money.
>
> As you'd expect I'm good buddies with my IT team who are now refusing
> to pay for Microsoft licenses when OOo is much better and is ISO
> standard. Requests for new workstations will have OOo installed, not
> MSO.
>