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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.'"
once again the known answer, you can get support from the community
;)
:)
i was the reponsible of the computer lab in a little school in mexico about two years ago, we ran linux, staroffice, gnome, kde, gimp, whatever you can name, aside from apache, sendmail, etc., and never run into troubles, nothing gets broked, no virus, etc, etc
oh, and the school owners where extatic about not having to pay a cent in licenses
of course, if you take a project like this, you need to know some things, but hey, isn't about learning and having fun with the process?
so, maybe it's just a case of knowing what resources you can get from the community, and use them
I have to disagree with this generalization. While I agree that many of the PCs in the school system are pretty much a waste of space and time, that doesn't mean they don't have a place.
At my high school (I graduated in '99), I took multiple classes about multimedia design and computer science. In fact, the Computer Science 1 class I took in high school gave me college credit which transferred easily to just about any major university in the state (Colorado).
At the same time however, there were 3 large computer labs at my high school and I recall being herded in there several times only to waste half of the class time learning completely useless software that barely demonstrated what we were supposed to learn. Given that, I think it's fair to say that computers in schools may be overhyped, but that doesn't mean they don't belong there.
I just moved the desktops over to Red Hat (I can't remember the version, but the kernel was 2.4.x), and installed free development utilitiies. OpenOffice wasn't really "there" yet, so I used Star Office. With the ability to lock down the machines efficiently (something difficult to impossible to do with Windows), the Novell client licenses were no longer needed. OpenBSD became their server. Voila, absolutely zero dollars were spent on licenses or new hardware. I billed them a measly $475 for my trouble (I used to work there, so I cut them some major slack. Besides, I really wanted to win one for the Linux crowd).
The downside: my pay had to come under the table, because the state was so locked for funds they were not allowed to out source - even though they were still allowed to visit their local MS salesman and blow $30,000. Go figure. In the end, the manager just told the brass that his admin had thought it all up. :)
They've got these computers scattered all throughout the school, all running linux. The art dept uses gimp for photos, etc. But their core apps are really a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, email & web. The beauty is, their elementry school is connected to the same network. Students get their account & homedir in 4th grade and it follows them until they graduate.
They can do much more interesting things with these networks, offer better classes w/ more technical focuses with everything they have. They don't need to worry about forking out several $k for licenses for certain software just to teach programming concepts, administration, etc...
This is exactly the kind of school I want my kids to grow up in, and if I don't end up homeschooling them, I'll do whatever it takes to get them in this one.
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Yeah, but when we were growing up, schools used macs, when people in the real world were using windows. Now people in the real world (well, everything but servers, high end graphics, video editing, computer animation, web site design, programming) heh, that's a lot that's done on Linux. And Linux usage isn't going to get smaller, by the time these kids are in a good job Linux will be standard. Of course by that time they will have forgot it all anyway, so what's the fuss? :-)
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
For a project at my son's school (I ws a parent mystery guest) I demonstrated to the kids how easy it is to install Linux over a Microsoft laden box and what you could do with it.
For the most part the kids loved it, and they were so curious what the software was that could actually replace the great beast. Some of them thought it ran ontop of Windows. BTW - the kids are in 4th grade.
So I left them with the disks for RH7.3 and now they get a kick out of installing RedHat over the XP disks they had paid for, and vice-versa. It's quite funny, but now they're learning how to replace the OSes back forth (for practice I 'spoze). I'm thinking of going in to show them more - dual boots, other things they can do w/ it.
The real funny part is that my son said that a couple of kids got in an argument over what OS was better than the other, available s/w, games - etc. I think it's quite funny. Good think it didn't come to blows!
I went to college in Harrisonburg. It is the home of James Madison University. JMU's CS curriculum teaches people on the UNIX platform. Most all of the programming assignments are submitted via one of the Sun boxes there. There are a couple programming classes for MS applications but they are by far not the most popular. Also, they teach simple networking based on UNIX and linux as well. So if the city really wanted someone to support the infrastructure they built in the public schools, all they would need to do is form some sort of joint program with the college to have students come over and support it. Maybe give them Internship/CO-OP credits for it. The reality is that if more schools would work with colleges in a format like this then there stands the great possibility of major advancement in technology curriculum on BOTH sides.
Honesty may be the best policy, but apparently by elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
One guy in particular single-handedly killed an implementation of the Linux Terminal Server Project at the high school with a relentless barage of FUD..
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Nonsense, the decision to hire someone has a lot more to do with than what software they're famaliar with.
COMPLETELY dependant on the HR person in companies big enough to have those, which I think the original poster probably had in mind.
I know that sounds crazy to some geeks, but if you're doing hiring based soley on whether Jane knows Outlook, Notes, Pine or just Hotmail then your company is in deeper trouble than any commercial software package can fix.
Most companies ARE in deep trouble when it comes to effectively dealing with technology.
Your post also ignores the fact that most office software can be learned in an afternoon and the user can be brought up to the level of intermediate user if not expert in a couple weeks of real use.
HR people don't care. Many don't know much themselves about the ins and outs of computers, and generally don't assume anyone else can learn past what they know.
I tried using a headhunter agency once to find me a job. I didn't have 'CGI' on my resume, just Perl and Python and PHP and a few others. He said I wouldn't get hired anywhere. I took 30 seconds to explain that CGI was effectively shorthand for someone who knew Perl or something like that. Didn't get an interview, didn't get called back, never returned calls, etc. I'd insulted him by showing him up, even though I was trying to help him more effectively do his job, which was keeping up with technological buzzwords.
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