According to research by a German IT provider, almost a quarter of computers in Germany run the OpenOffice.org office suite.
That’s not bad! Given that 17% did not have an Office suite installed, that figure could go up dramatically if those users were made aware of the free product (assuming they don’t know already).
It’s happening all around the world, but here is a report from Germany and Danmark about schools rolling out OpenOffice.org.
The administration of the Danish municipality of Lyngby-Taarbæk is installing OpenOffice on some 1700 school desktop PCs, the administration announced yesterday. The first school where OpenOffice will be installed is the Lindegård school. At the school earlier today mayor Rolf Aagaard-Svendsen showed the first desktop running the open source suite of productivity tools. According to a report by the Danish IT news site Version2, the move to open source is intended to prevent students from using unlicensed software.
Meanwhile in Germany, trials of OpenOffice.org has begun as servers are migrated to Linux.
The city of Münster has started a pilot using OpenOffice in schools. The city’s IT department, Citeq, will also switch all of the 150 servers used in its primary and secondary schools over to GNU/Linux. Half of these have already been migrated to open source.
Hopefully we will see more of this as time rolls on!