Sometimes it's alright to steal
I was looking at an advertisement for Microsoft Office 2007 Professional Edition in the Straits Times, and guess what? It costs a freaking SG$789!!! Whoa, almost $800! Ridiculous, isn't it? I can buy a low-mid range computer with this sum of money.
I wonder how parents will react when kids come home saying they need Microsoft Office to do their homework "because my teacher wants me to hand in using Microsoft Word format". A single look at the price tag will make most parents blanche. And most will immediately turn to pirated software.
Isn't this contradictory? On one hand, we tell the kids that "stealing is bad", on the other hand, we buy stolen stuff for them. How confused will the kids be?
What sad times we are living in. We download music and movies from the Internet without paying the artists a single cent (yes yes, I know the RIAA/MPAA issue is way out of hand), buy pirated software to save a few bucks, and then lie to our kids that stealing is bad. Sigh...
There are always alternatives, you know? Listening to internet radio, renting movies to watch, and using Open Office instead of Microsoft Office. At the very least, teaching the kids how to look for ethical alternatives will help develop their problem solving skills.
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Maybe can try to start by getting MOE to start using OpenOffice only instead?
There was a submission to MOE about using OpenOffice to save costs. But Microsoft already had an agreement with MOE, so there goes that suggestion.
The last I heard, the plan is to convince IDA to use ODF (Open Document Format) instead of MS DOC, to avoid vendor lock-in. Not sure if there's anything going on after that first meeting though. Harish Pillay's the one on it.
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