Can Linux Beat Microsoft in Education?

Booker asks: "Microsoft has been the driving force behind the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF), a system by which education-related applications can communicate with each other via XML messages. Although Microsoft is the coordinator, the spec seems extremely open, and something that Linux applications could easily work with. Many vendors have signed on to the SIF, and it looks like it will become a standard, at least in North America. What do you think? Could Linux stake a claim as a server for this new standard? What would it take to port this code?" This would be cool. Anyone interested in tackling this one?

"One of the things Microsoft has done to support this standard is to release a Zone Integration Server which manages the queuing and authentication between the various client applications attached to it. The interesting thing, though, is that the source code is available, and the license is quite liberal - liberal enough, I think, that a Linux port would be possible.

Comments

Short answer, No.

[Lord Kano]

The goal shouldn't be to "beat Microsoft" in this market. I do service work for a few schools and the teachers are probably the worst of all users whom I've encountered.

Just yesterday, the school I was at had a stack of service request forms and nearly half of them were because one idiot teacher saw that some kids had deleted an alias from the desktop and thought that the computers were broken.

These people aren't going to embrace linux. They've struggled long and hard to be able to turn on and turn off Windows and MacOS machines. Most of them don't have the desire or the ability to learn to use linux.

It's already known that linux can compete with M$ in the server arena. We won't be able to, nor should we want to bankrupt M$. The goal is to have as many choices as possible. MacOS, Linux, *BSD, Windows (whatever), BeOS, and straight old fashioned *NIX are all acceptable OSes for a given task.

M$ will be around in some form or another for the forseeable future, because so many business and governments have invested their futures in it's products. What we need as an atmosphere of healthy and honest competition.

LK

Not open source

[YoJ]

The license only allows you to distribute and use the software for educational purposes. This violates clause 6 of the guidelines, so it is not open source. (Clause 6 is the non-discrimination of field of endeavor).

Nathan Whitehead

Interesting...seems BSDish

[vsync64]

Hm. Although I am neither a lawyer nor a license guru, this seems quite similar to the BSD license. Note the obnoxious advertising clause.

Also, it seems to share a number of RMS's requirements, such as the patent issue. From MS's license:

a. Patents. Any patent obtained by a redistributor of the Program must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.

This is quite interesting. I suspect this license would fall under the open source guidelines, and quite possibly qualify as Free Software as well.

Is this a first from Microsoft? Does this mark a quiet change in strategy, or are they just making sure that they can avoid any legal issues? I suspect government contracts might have provisions against the use of proprietary stuff. Or they should, not that that's stopped the people in my school district... They seem to enjoy locking students into only using Word or some such.