I sent in a suggestion to the Cut Waste panel run by the Ministry of Finance about using OpenOffice, Linux and open source products in the schools. To the credit of the Cut Waste panel, they did reply. But the response from a education ministry person is really unhelpful. What has my suggestion got to do with Oracle? Why is it that they cannot answer the question rasied about OpenOffice usage – and this a education ministry person? I am awaiting feedback about OpenCD from them (not expecting to see anything though). My hunch is that they have not even tried out openoffice.org!

And given the recent ranking of Singapore having quite a bit of unofficial copies of commercial software, isn’t time these people started looking at viable alternatives?