@bob that's true. And I'm keen to change that aspect of gov't, as it's not in the best interest of the people.

@lightweight @bob I hope NZ government takes inspiration from the EU
https://social.network.europa.eu/about

The mindset needs to change from using Zoom to bigbluebutton or jitsi meet.

I meet this resistance everywhere in the academia here as well, very few people are ready to use R/Julia/Python for their data analysis or LibreOffice to write their papers, instead jump into MS products and other paid options and brag about it. People used to laugh at me when I proposed #rstats at UC in 2007 when I joined.

@arin_basu @lightweight @bob
I get the feeling that there are still a lot of academic administrators who are very firmly in the old school "no one got fired for buying IBM" mindset, and being lobbied heavily to keep them that way. Microsoft and other large vendors will happily do "deals" to make them feel flattered and keep them locked in, even when that still ends up costing the institution more than the increasingly reasonable alternatives.

@DrCuriosity @lightweight @bob

Yes, you are spot on!

A few months ago I was discussing with a university academic in charge of digital learning about using virtual reality to classrooms and a project I proposed for consideration for courses I teach at the university. I was talking about using #mozilla #hubs when he told me how they were "influenced" by Microsoft to adopt the hololens for VR.

@arin_basu @DrCuriosity @bob when the Hitlab first started at UC (I knew Tom Furness, the original Hitlab guy at UW in Seattle from prior to moving to NZ) we (Egressive) was their first commercial partner. All their software then was #FOSS. That rapidly changed when Microsoft started giving them funding... and exerting influence.