DK: Lyngby-Taarbæk moves schools to OpenOffice
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.
The switch to OpenOffice also helps to save costs, that can now be used to purchase new IT equipment, the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency (ITST), adds today in a statement.
The Lyngby-Taarbæk municipality needed to purchase six hundred new school PCs to replace outdated computers, explains Jens Kjellerup, head of the administration's IT department. By moving to open source, the municipality saved an amount equal to 25 percent of the amount needed for the new hardware. "Moving to open source paid for about 150 of these computers."
ITST says the Lyngby-Taarbæk municipality decided to move to open source following recommendations by the Ministry of Science that this type of software should be considered when procuring IT solutions. "The choice was clear, the municipality now switches to open source and will thus be able to afford new computers."
The use of open source brings more than economic benefits, writes ITST. Since the software can be distributed freely, it allows the students to use the same software at home. "They should find it easier to do their homework", it quotes one of the involved IT administrators.
Morten Kristoffer Hansen, projectleader at Softwarebørsen, the ITST's software development site, says many other schools in Denmark are interested in Lyngby-Taarbæk's move to open source.
e-Learning
According to the agency, the project in Lyngby-Taarbæk municipality involves two more open source applications, Åben Skrivestøtte ('open writing assistance'), that helps in teaching pronunciation, and OpenOffice FarvOrd, ('colour word'), for improving grammar and punctuation. These two tools are developed by the Århus and Tønder municipalities respectively and are made available on Softwarebørsen.
More information:
ITST statement (in Danish)
Version2 news item (in Danish)
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