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Microsoft vs. Northwest Schools Part III
SymphonicMan writes: "As previously discussed on Slashdot, Microsoft threatened an audit for the 24 largest school districts in the Northwest. Now it appears they may be backing down, according to Steve Duin, the Oregonian columnist who orginally brought this to all of our attention in April. Not only that, he writes that Portland Public Schools is opening 16 Linux computer labs across the districts, at half the cost of a Microsoft-equipped lab. Looks like this might be more than just a PR victory for open source. I'm a senior in one of the districts (Beaverton) included in the audit, and our staff is still going crazy trying to comply. But with districts across Oregon facing major budget shortfalls due to the poor economy, removing the pressure of this audit would be very welcome."
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
During the American Revolutionary war, the British consistantly believed that the colonies were full of loyalist supporters. When they found far fewer loyalists than they hoped for, they hired indians to fight for them. Suddenly, the large number of people in the middle swung over to support ... the rebels. Oops.
=brian
In my school district, we are facing even more budget cuts, yet I never hear anyone talk about how to reduce costs other than cutting back on salaries or materials. We should be cutting back on other costs like electricity and software. By using 12v lighting, and putting solar panels on the roof of every school we could save a lot of cash. By requiring special permits for not using free (as in beer) software, we could save money there too.
The reason I emphasise the use of "free" in the monetary sense is that I'm talking about school budgets, not software philosophy. Of course once people are into using free (as in beer) software, then you can more easilly talk to them about free (as in speech) software.
t'nera semordnilap
I read Duin's article this morning, & one item that he emphasized -- & hasn't gotten any attention -- was that MS pulled this same tactic with other school systems across the US. As a direct result Randy Baker, the tech coordinator for 16 school districts (& 12,000 end users) in central Iowa, ``completely dumped Microsoft last summer and migrated everything to Linux."
Anybody have more details about this migration?
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
In order to fulfill my high school's community service requirements, I decided to volunteer at a local Head Start program for underprivliged children. It was a great feeling to work there and see the smiles on the faces of the children when I would show up in the morning, knowing that there was not much else to be happy about while living in abject poverty. They even had a few old computers (I believe 486s) running Windows 95 for the children to learn on. I always look back upon those last two weeks of my sophomore year (which were dedicated to allowing students to pursue their community service projects) with much fondness.
Well, the next year, when the time to register for community service projects rolled around again, I went to see my service counselor about helping at Head Start again. However, I was shocked at what she told me. Apparently, the Head Start program had to be shut down in the beginning of the school year because Microsoft had decided to audit them and found that they didn't have nearly enough licenses for Windows to be running them on all of the 486s in the school (which were donated by a bank, IIRC). The legal costs alone bankrupted the program, and a bunch of little children will now miss yet another opportunity to enrich themselves and perhaps leave the downward spiral of destitute poverty.
in eastern iowa (scott) we run linux on all server machines, in the sail room, and I think they are contemplating replacing the library computers.
The 'find a book' computers in the library are running os/2 if I recal.
People need jobs, and if this is the case, then lets get these jobs filled. Not only would you be working in these times of economic strife, but to also be helping in the "cause"?!?
Heck, if the jobs were there, I would be applying myself. The problem seems to be that the school workers have become entrenched in the system, and are waiting for that guaranteed 8% retirement every cycle. Would you give up a job that regardless of what the rest of the world was doing, you were guaranteed 8% paid to your retirement EACH and every year?Until these people (who are as inept as you say) can be replaced with people who know what they are doing, this is a moot point.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
I never understood the fear linux users had of showing their OS to other people. "What if they can't use it and they go buy Windows?" Didn't happen to me. Have some faith in the product.
How much does Windows XP cost? (Not the "home use only" version.) How much does Office cost? And how often do you have to keep paying Micros**t?
Schools often have a lot of donated machines that don't cost anywhere near $800 each.
Also untrue. I have taught your average US high-school students (i.e. the "dumb" ones that the media and the Republicans keep telling us about) intro computer stuff on Linux. I taught them how to use emacs (optional) and LaTeX (required). Not that the US public education system doesn't need serious help -- but you are doing students an even greater injustive if you underestimate them and feed them pablum.Unlimited growth == Cancer.
I agree, with a little reservation.
Having worked for a small California school district, I've found that the (not insurmountable) challenge facing school districts is that the kids already know enough about computers to creat a systems management nightmare. Those of us that are corporate system administrators have had it easy compared to those that have been exposed to what a 14-year-old can do to your app server.
I'm not whining; this is a challenge, not a problem. But in an education system that's looking to cut costs, it's important to remember that management (and more importantly, retraining) costs factor in. What does it cost to retrain your instructors on a new OS? What does it cost *not* to?
*Ponder Ponder*
We all get along together like tornadoes and trailer parks.
The truth of the matter is, windows is perfect for what schools teach (which isn't much). They teach 99% of students to be typists, capable of using word and mucking around a bit in excel.
Which is strange when you think about it... the age of the typewriter is dead, there will come a time when we don't have to employ wageslaves to type dead trees back into electronic form.
So, what would you teach kids if not teaching them to be typing monkeys incapable of truly using a computer? Me, I'd dig those apple IIe's out of the closet, and teach them assembly language on the 6502. Teach them to write a compiler, and write their own programs with that compiler. The first kid to write a video game in such a fashion, gets an A+ and doesn't have to do anything but play the game the rest of the year. I'd teach them how to interface to that crappy 8bit bus, and have them dream up things to interface to it. We'd build them in class. They hate crappy resolution, with only a few colors? Maybe we'd take a crack at building an SVGA card for it.
And maybe, just maybe, those who passed that class would be eligible for the classes that use Mac OSX or linux on the g4 powermacs. Why those? Because x86 stinks, even if the rest of the hardware that goes with it is tolerable nowdays.
So, unless you were serious... tell me what *is wrong* with using Apple IIe's in the classroom.
If you just have hardware and no software, what does it hurt to let the kids mess things up. Hell find the bright kids like that, and create a class in which the ultimate project is to create a system management solution for the school. The bright kids who know how to mess things up, created the system and wouldn't want to destroy it. And hopefully at the same time, created some security in the knowledge that other students might mess things up. Of course this is being done on only a few computers till the system they develop has been finalized and a real system admin can check its security. Till this point in time you leave your old system in place for the rest of the students to use. Once the system goes live, the new computer students each year train the previous computer students in the system, and instill respect of the existing system untill the new students start thinking it as their own to protect. Of course no sensative data should be kept on these computers, but that shouldn't be a major problem.
I lived in the Beaverton area for a couple of years, it's not the kind of place that's going to be easily bullied by MSFT, or anybody else for that matter. One of the nicknames for this area was the "silicon forest", a takeoff on the Bay Area's high-tech reputation. There's a very high ratio of technologically clueful folks there. There's also an unusually high level of disdain for MSFT, especially among the Intel folk I used to work with. I never did understand it, why Intel engineers disliked MSFT so much. Anyways, it was up there I got introduced to Linux for the first time.
But it would really surprise me to see the schools that got audited dump MSFT lock, stock, and barrel anytime soon. The only clueless folk I ever did any business with up there were the schools. Stupifyingly dense and criminally arrogant. Thankfully, they're also almost totally inneffective as administrators so they won't be able to keep Linux out.
The story is even better than it appears. Check out The K-12 Linux Project, also in Portland, Oregon. (Moderators: Please don't mod down people who mention this project in other contexts. Mod them up.)
Linux Terminal software is used with diskless workstations to create a 5 workstation network for under $1,000.
Here is a quote: "All applications run on the terminal server. The workstations are "thin." They have no software or hard drives. Thin clients are perfect for schools because they are easy to install and require little maintenance. They are reliable and immune to malicious tampering and viruses".
Intel is giving free processors to schools.
It's all set up and ready to go. Just download the software and follow the instructions.
"The Multnomah Education Service District [Portland, Oregon, again] has moved most of it's core network services to Linux. Linux powers DNS, DHCP, mail relays, proxy servers, web filters, and directory services for the 45,000 administrators, teachers, and students within our agency and the school districts we support . For our agency and a couple of our districts, Linux powers the web, mail, FTP, and file servers."
I was told that it took 4 full-time people to maintain the MESD system when it was using Microsoft software. Now it takes 1 person half time.
Government administrators should note that it is their duty to insure that all government work be done on completely open systems. The citizens and taxpayers of a democracy must have full access to all documents, even 40 or a hundred years from now. There is NO room in a democracy for proprietary, hidden ways of doing things.
That's a very good question that very few people bother to ask. There is a clause in their so-called "license" which states that they are allowed to "audit" you; and that clause, presumably, gives Microsoft the right to send in the enforcers. However, legally, it does not hold any water. Even if we assume that EULA is enforcible as a whole (a dubious assumption), that particular clause would be thrown out if the matter ever went to court.
This "auditing" clause essentially amounts to a search without a search warrant by a non-government agency. In case you didn't know, even the police cannot come to your house and search you whenever they feel like it. They must first obtain a search warrant, which is signed by a judge. And to get the warrant, police need to show that there is a likelihood of finding the desired evidence.
There are two problems with BSA/Microsoft audits. First they are not the police, so they have no authority to conduct the searches. Their "license" doesn't hold any water -- there are certain rights that you cannot sign away. Second, even if the BSA was ever annointed as the official copyright enforcement police, they would still need to show that there is some likelihood of finding unauthorised copies of software at whatever school/business they were trying to search. Random searches wouldn't be permitted. BSA admits -- nay, brags! -- that the vast majority of their tipoffs comes from disgruntled employees. In a court of law such "evidence" would be dismissed as hearsay. And that's without even getting into the issue of good-faith efforts of the companies to stay compliant with the license vs. the unauthorised installations by individual employees (or, perhaps, outright sabotage -- see note above about disgruntled employees).
So, as you can see, legally, Microsoft enforcers have no leg to stand on. BSA backed off the few companies that did decide to fight it.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Has everyone forgotten the terms of the anti-trust settlement? I'm guessing that MS wants to put pressure on the schools in a misguided attempt to gain their support--MS believes that schools would prefer donated MS software to the BSA breathing down their necks.
The real question is in how many school districts this is backfiring, resulting in migrations to Linux.