Jacob Romeyn

I got this instead of the Month on an 1.3 upgrade:

strftimemonthyear >>

I think you did not do the following step in the Install file:

Create a /moodle/dmsfiles/ directory, and make it world writable with

chmod 777 /moodle/dmsfiles/

This was published by: Technology in Government  Volume 11 Issue 03 2004  (Canada)

Microsoft's interest in developing countries fuelled by fear, not love

Global governments are investigating open source as an alternative MS Office

Bill Gates these days reminds me of The Church Lady. Yes, there's a physical resemblance between the similarly bespectacled Microsoft Corp. chairman and The Church Lady, that memorable television character created by comedi- an Dana Carvey for Saturday Night Live interview sketches. But for me the simili- tude has more to do with ulterior motives.

On the surface, The Church Lady took a sincere interest in her interview guests' problems. Similarly, Bill Gates appears to be taking a sincere interest in the problems of information technology- deprived countries.  Earlier this year, for example,  Microsoft announced it would funnel through the United Nations a good chunk of the US$1 billion it has set  aside for software and training in devel- oping nations. The contribution will finance new computer centres in poor communities, beginning with pilot proj- ects in Morocco and Mozambique.  Meanwhile, Gates himself has been visiting the likes of Egypt and "working together" with President Mubarak on an "open" e-government mode! to help loosen up the notoriously bureaucratic regimes of the Arab world.

Questionable motives

But this all makes me wonder about motives. The Church Lady's real goal, you'll recall, was not to show them com- passion, but rather to hurl sanctimonious accusations at her guests: "Isn't the real problem;' she would shrill, "the fact that you've been doing too much (fill in something sinful)?"

Similarly, if Bill Gates had been  guest of The Church Lady, she/he might have asked/accused: "But Billy, what  you're really worrying about is the grow- ing open-source movement - and espe- cially how governments are rejecting Microsoft Office in favour of OpenOffice, isn't that true?" Last fall, for  instance, the chief

technology officer for Massachusetts announced that forth- with the state govern- ment would pursue an "open standards,  open source" policy in all its IT spending -  thereby threatening to . Bill Gates put a huge dent in Microsoft's share of the state's US$80 million yearly IT budget. 

In December, the City of Austin, Texas announced it would almost entirely  replace its Microsoft Office installations with the open source-based  OpenOffice.org productivity suite. B oth moves reflect a word_wide trend to cut government costs with open-source software. Mind you, with annual revenues of US$30 billion or so, that's not going to loosen Microsoft'stranglehold much. But no doubt the bralntrust in .Redmond knows that governments are always the largest single purchaser of IT and that collectively they control a huge 10 per cent portion of IT spending  around the world. No doubt, too, there's been notice of other cracks in the Microsoft monolith:

with Sun and IBM to develop a Hebrew version of OpenOffice and is distributing it to departments as an alternative to Microsoft Office.

In Portugal, the city council of Arraiolos first tested with key users then adopted OpenOffice as the foundation for all the city's public administration.

The caregivers at Memorial Hospital in Istanbul, Turkey are using OpenOffice on allc250 hospital computers.

.

In December, the European Union set up a Free and Open Source (FlOSS) Web site that encourages open-source style e- government for all EU member countries.

.

A Danish study has come right out and said that the EU should  actively investigate using alternatives to Microsoft Office including OpenOffice.

. In Germany, Open Office's publicly  supported users include government surveyors, mapmakers, Bundestag administrators, home care health work- ers, university employment counsellors,  and the Police .

By the end of 2003, nearly 25 million people had downloaded Open Office from OpenOffice.org, including me.

One can imagine Ihe Church Lady asking now: "Just how more fingers do you have to put in that dam, Bill?"

AAndy Shaw is a contributing editor to Technology in Government. Please contact him at andyshaw@ca.inter.net

I found a link to pWhiteboard.   I uses Mysql  and PHP.   May be a nice module for Moodle:

http://chxo.com/pWhiteboard/

pWhiteboard is open source, and Free software, released under the Gnu GPL