Re: [Fsfe-uk] BECTA discriminate against FLOSS?

[ian]

On Wed, 2003-12-17 at 11:55, address@hidden wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 09:09:12AM +0000, ian wrote:
> > 
> > Also they say an office suite with WP, SS and presentation and that
> > shareware, freeware is unacceptable. Same for E-mail. Does this include
> > FLOSS? ie is OpenOffice.org not allowed? Seems particularly daft if
> > StarOffice is since its effectively the same software over the required
> > applications. Then there is mandatory anti-virus software.
> 
> Ian,
> 
> Personally I don't see that they are discriminating against openoffice.org,
> openoffice is GPL, GPL software can be sold (if you want I will put it in a 
> box
> and sell it to you for the same price as Microsoft Office and with full
> support) as long as you make the source available so it may be a bad idea to
> point this out to them :)

Good point. I doubt they will have thought of it though.

> I would say that the OS requirements are daft though, the anti-virus isn't a
> big deal as there are free software antivirus tools.

But some OSs don't need AV so why worry? Also some AV is more effective
than others.

>  The other parts of the
> spec that make me laugh are a 3 year warranty on the battery (i don't know of
> any supplier that offers this) and also the minimum 1 1/2 hours battery life
> with all power saving things disabled with cpu at 100%, I reckon that would
> melt the laptop after about 10 minutes.

Yes, but many suppliers still dive in and worry about the details later.

> 
> Adam
-- 
ian <address@hidden>