Slashdot Mirror
An Informal Study Of K12 Classroom Software Costs
PGillingwater writes "Rob Lineweaver has written a concise summary of how much it would cost (and the savings that can be achieved) to set up the (almost) complete infrastructure in the Harrisonburg City Public Schools. He estimates that using commercial packages instead of open source would have cost the K12 schools an extra $27,000 in software license costs.
More interestingly, he states that this is not only about cost. He says: 'This makes it apparent that not all of the benefit of open source software deployment in is the form of cost savings; much of the benefit is in terms of capabilities gained. In other words, through the use of free software, I am able to do more within my budget than I could if I only had commercial solutions available.'"
Getting the software for cheaper (free) is one thing, but what kind of "costs" are you going to get for using this software. Sure you may save $27k but what happens when something break? Will you need to hire someone capable of handling open source software and how much will he cost per year? What if something breaks and a service is down for a while, there will be no company to hold up their software and support it, it is now up to you.
I know of lots of educational software titles for Windows. How many titles are available under Linux? How many of the Windows titles will run under Wine?
Apologies to those who don't like this idea, but it seems like there have been a lot of "we saved x dollars by switch to linux" or "we lost x dollars by using commercial software."
So it seems kinda pointless to keep stating the obvious over and over again.
Just my $.02
neurostarIt's a great idea, but out in the real world, people use commercial software. If kids aren't educated in how to use it, they won't be able to compete. I think introducing free software and its concepts into the education system is a good idea, but we shouldn't forsake the kids' futures for the sake of indoctrination. Teach both, and let the kids decide what's best.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
The title of the report is "Cost savings of open source software in the server room." If you let the kids back there, you might be in trouble.
Of course, this will probably just have the effect of freeing up $27,000 for windows machines in the classroom.
Do you automatically get support with closed source? Not usually. Just about every time I try to get ahold of a 'real person', you still have to pay for anything if you want more than what they happen to have already on their website.
The open source community typically provides much better online support than closed source, and you can still purchase support from RedHat et al, if it is needed. So support is really a non-issue, at least in my book.
Why? simple.
1) because it saves time and work in keeping track of windows licenses.
2) because it actually teaches children about computers, rather than just about GUIs and what can be done on them. When all the low-level things are done in the background, its no wonder the average american doesn't know what formatting a hard drive does aside from kill all their data.
3) teaches troubleshooting. Using nothing but windows, you'll never realize how much easier it is to use a command line tool for something simple.
4) provides compilers and development environments for those who are adept enough to care to use them
5) difficult for learning students to bring down the whole computer from a user-class account
6) it's free, and provides alternatives to almost anything that can be done under windows that they'll need to do in anything but very specific areas (which will catch up with time anyway).
7) UNIX is time-tested as a style of environment. Windows is controlled by the whims of the market.
There are others, but that pretty much covers the basics. Anything I missed, besides:
8: PROFIT!!!!
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
As somebody who has lived close to this area in the past, I must say that Harrisonburg City only has 4000 students TOTAL in only 6 schools (only 1 high school and 1 middle school). So I would think of it less as a city and more as a small rural community. This means there is likely only one or two people that would essentially be setting up and running this network. Perhaps it will indeed save them money when deploying their new infrastructure, but god forbid this guy move out of the area! I also must question some of the software packages and their "amounts" that he has determined. While I am not advocating Windows by any means, Apache, PHP, mySql, analog, and plenty of other packages he has listed run completely fine on a Win32-based system. I would be concerned about how well the teachers/faculty/students will be able to utilize the system efficiently (reminds of yesterday's kids on linux post), and be able to do trivial tasks. I'm just not sure that these costs are in line with the size of their school system, and whether or not the savings are actually going to amount to a better learning experience for the school community.
The kind of money they're talking about is not that much in terms of the total cost of having all the computers. The big costs have nothing to do with Windows licenses. They have to do with network infrastructure, paying people to maintain the hardware and software, and keeping the hardware current.
The other problem is that the faculty and administrators want the machines at work to use the same OS they're used to using at home. That means Windows for 95% of them, and MacOS for 5%. I don't know a single person besides myself on my campus who uses Linux at home. It's hard enough to convince them to support MacOS.
There's also the problem of unavailability of the relevant applications.
Find free books.
He saved money using free software instead of commercial software? How's that? Can someone explain the math to me? Duh...
It's about a lot more than the up front costs. His pricing is simplistic and the writeup, pardon me for saying, but sophmoric, at best and doesn't apply to a number of other real-life situatins.
How much is support going to cost? Are you going to have in-house experts? How much are they going to cost compared to the people who don't have to be as smart to run the equivalent Windows software?
There are a lot of other fringe areas that need to be considered to come up with a true lifetime cost for software, and this doesn't even scratch the surface.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for Open Source. I love my Open Office and I'm having a blast with Linux. But I'm a geek.
Someone else mentioned the fact that most real-world companies use commercial software and these kids won't have experience with it. Good point.
Sorry, but this is hardly a booster for Open Source. This is like saying, "People save money by shopping during a sale." Not exactly news.
not only that, but when little sally asks how a webserver works, instead of the Microsoft answer that is "it just does" you can show her the sourcecode to apache and watch her little head explode.
seriously.. having the ability to look at the nuts and bolts makes better students... teaching the kids the normal click and drool is not computer science... it's office machines / secritarial. It's about damned time that computer science classes MEANT computer science.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
school children are failing at the basics, I say we are spending to much money on computers/software.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
eSchool News just did a recent story on Linux in schools. Nice read.
For us, we are so locked into MS right now - the licensing fees are unbelievable. Servers, Cals, Office, Mail, etc cost us around 30K per year. In one recent example of price schemes - Office 97 and Pub 97 were separate packages (we didn't get Pub). For Office 2000 MS combined them and you got Pub for free. Office 2002 - they yank Pub back out (nice bait and switch!) and it costs an additional $5 per seat (5x1000+ pcs) We opted out and decided not be jerked around like that. We are a very technologically robust district with a computer at every teacher's desk and 1 to 5 computers in each classroom for student use, plus labs, libraries and tech ed rooms. In addition to the MS licensing, we have a huge investment in educational software and various databases to run the district. Our student pop is around 4000. Our anti-virus alone runs us 10K a year, plus firewall and citrix 10/10. There's more. I am stunned at how much we spend, versus starting with a meager 100K budget for everything, several years ago. We need our enterprise antivirus and firewall. We need our student information database and electronic libraries. But we were sucked into the MS spiral out-of-control licensing. We have invested years of training students and staff and administrators. It is very difficult to switch now. If I were starting fresh, I'd switch to free/open in a heartbeat.
Who do you call when commercial software breaks? Unless you're paying additional monthly or annual maintenance fees, chances are the vendor isn't going to want to talk to you.
Someone pointed out the third "free" is free as in market. With commercial software, only the vendor can support you. You pay their price or you get nothing. With free-as-in-speech software you get free-as-in-market software support: you can pay as much or as little as you'd like, for varying levels of support, and presumably varying levels of expertise.
--
E_NOSIG
The purpose of the general education system is to teach students to think and understand the world we live in. The point of school is not, and has never been, to train our youth to join the ranks of the working. That is the purpose of trade schools. If you teach a child how to learn then they will be able to tackle whatever work most interests them. Same goes for teaching programming languages in schools. Stop trying to teach Java to high school students; instead focus on something like pascal or better yet some kind of functional programming. These may not be used in the "real world" as much, but they sure do make you think.
.plan!! what plan?
How will someone be able to get a job when they lack such basic skills as using a Windows based machine.
Uh....look around you. All those people using Windows and Office now, 98% of them have never had any training whatsoever. Most of 'em can't even type, though significantly more of them can type than can, say, use fdisk or regedit. They don't know the first thing about how to actually run these programs. If they need to learn an unfamiliar program, they co-pilot it with an experienced user, who probably did the same thing to learn it themselves.
I spent 30 minutes setting up screensavers with a user yesterday. Part of it was fun, but the other part was helping her become a little more familiar with the UI.
I do think it would be nice if people got some training in Microsoft products. But then Microsoft changes everything aroudn with each major release. Look at the XP desktop compared to the 2000 desktop; they're so different. The taskbar behaves completely differently now, etc. etc. So even if they do learn it in school, that knowledge will be semi-useless in two or five years.
Oh, wait, you were joking. Ha ha. Nevermind.
There is nothing wrong with teaching and expecting someone to know more about what makes the tools they use everyday work (and I shudder to think what it would have cost me to get a new booster and master cylinder installed in my truck at a shop - I did it in about 3 hours last Sunday, for the cost of parts - pretty simple job, actually).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I agree with that thought. However, I know a few non-technical people who would argue the opposite:
I am sure these same people would think it was a good idea that the kids learn to use m$ office because that's what everyone else uses.
My kids are going to learn on UNIX!
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Sorry man but I disagree...
/s" that isn't teaching me? It doesn't matter if its pc windows linux mac or nextcube black, if a person doesn't know what formatting is and they nuke their hard drive the OS they're using has no relevance to that. Next point..
1) because it saves time and work in keeping track of windows licenses.
While this may have been true in the pre win2k server days, using group policies you can really keep a handle on both OS and application licenses. Don't want a student installing that warezed copy of photoshop? Make a group policy, Only want the art computers to have photoshop? Make a group policy.
2) because it actually teaches children about computers, rather than just about GUIs and what can be done on them. When all the low-level things are done in the background, its no wonder the average american doesn't know what formatting a hard drive does aside from kill all their data.
So if I use a dos boot disk and type "format c:
3) teaches troubleshooting. Using nothing but windows, you'll never realize how much easier it is to use a command line tool for something simple.
From my experience on the corporate lan, %85 of all trouble tickets go to outlook/exchange issues, %10 to network issues, and the other %5 go to hardware issues. So if you took outlook/exchange out of the loop and just dealt with the other %15 your troubleshooting methods would be the same on a windows machine as they are a linux box.
[on the network]
Open up a shell/dos prompt. Ping that router, ping that nameserver, do a NSlookup.
[hardware]
jiggle that card, make sure that ram is seated correctly, make sure cables are plugged in where they supposed to be, smell for smoke
So basically you learn the same either way. The most basic networking tools exist on both platforms.
4) provides compilers and development environments for those who are adept enough to care to use them
You mean GCC? Here you can get it for windows too http://gcc.gnu.org/install/specific.html#windows
5) difficult for learning students to bring down the whole computer from a user-class account
I'll go back to my first point with group policies on that one.
6) it's free, and provides alternatives to almost anything that can be done under windows that they'll need to do in anything but very specific areas (which will catch up with time anyway).
I spent a month on RH8, i've got to say, it sucked for a desktop. Sure I love using it for a router and the website im in charge of uses it (check my sig) for a desktop it just plain sucks (didn't we have a discussion on this last week?) Sure there is open source alternatives (Read GIMP) but gimp isn't professional grade yet, it doesn't do CYMK seperations. Kids need to learn whats in the real world, real world desktops use windows.
7) UNIX is time-tested as a style of environment. Windows is controlled by the whims of the market.
So unix is like a stubborn child and windows does what the parents want?
Like I said before, i'm not trying to dis linux/unix in any way, but it's still not ready for primetime. If you wanted to give kids an insight into unix, get a bunch of macs with OSX. Then that way you can give them the best of both worlds.
Funny, I was never told to RTFM when I asked for commercial support.
I doubt anyone offering commercial support of closed or open source software would tell you to RTFM.
With the free support you get online, you are just as likely to get a "RTFM" from a Microsoft newsgroup/IRC channel as you are from a Linux one. Such is life with unmoderated public forums.
The open source community direly needs to lose the punks for it to be reliable for education and commercial support.
Yeah, because those "punks" are the same ones running companies who charge for commercial support of open source. Get real. Have you ever paid for commercial support of an open source product? It works just like closed-source support - a professional providing a support service for a fee, not some jackoff in an IRC channel.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
First the rebuttal:
... that wierd kid with the three earrings and rave-green hair just MIGHT be the next Dennis Ritchie or Nicholas Wirth.
... that's sorta like telling Albert Schweitzer that he can't go to Med School because there are so many doctors that he'll never NEED to practice medicine ...
... but there is a VERY limited job market for web designers and graphic artists, so they probably won't. Let's not offer them.
... very few subjects make a better tool for teaching critical and/or analytical thinking, as well as project planning skills and attention to detail.
> Many, many students will never program anything
> in their lives.
But it is not the school system's place to PREVENT them from learning to do so
> They'll never want to, and they'll never need
> to.
But, unless you are prescient, you'll not be able to know which will and which won't
> They need word processing.
WP takes about three months worth of daily use to learn as well as 99% of the people need to know it. Most K-12 kids learn so quickly that they will have adequate WP skills to last most of their lives after writing two ten-page reports.
> They might need graphics tools.
Oh
> The vast majority do NOT need compilers, huge
> bloated developing environments, or editors
> with obscure keystrokes.
And since only a few might benefit from them, NOBODY can have them? I'm certainly glad my children did not attend schools you administer.
Then, my points:
Kids need to be challenged, pushed beyond the limits they impose upon themselves, forced out of their "intellectual comfort zones." I sort of halfway agree that programming and systems administration aren't really appropriate core subjects in the "mainstream" curriculum of the public schools, but consider this
Programming and/or system administration suck as subjects taught for the subject matter skills they provide. Those skills become obsolete VERY quickly. However, as a vehicle for developing the mental skills that form the core of intellectual power, they are hard to beat.
Regards,
utter rubbish