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.'"

Comments

Re:yea but...

[mrojas]

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

Re:Tech. education is not the point of PCs in skew

[entrager]

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.

My experience with school migration

[mao che minh]

I saved a local state college-ran-library about $35,000 with a migration to Linux on their 35-40 desktops and their app/file/web server. Basically, they had a bunch of pentium 233 systems running Windows 95, Novell clients (so that the IT staff could manage them with ZenWorks), MS Office, and some C and C++ development utilities. To run newer software and some hardware (odd peripherals used by some librarians) they were going to have to move to Windows 98 (for USB and software support), which in turn would force some hardware upgrades (CPU and memory, near complete overhauls for some systems). And of course, their office and Windows licenses were about up, and they were looking at thousands of wasted dollars on their NT server and it's software alone.

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. :)

I went to a K-20 roundtable discussion on RH tour

[yorgasor]

On Monday, I attended a Linux-in-schools roundtable discussion at the end of RH's tour at Riverdale High School in Portland, OR. Riverdale built its entire network on a shoestring budget. It got a bunch of small IBM cases for $15/ea on Ebay, a $50 mobo and donated P2-350s from Intel, but they splurged a bit on 15" flat panel monitors. All their desktops are used basically as xterms that students can use to log into one of 4 beefy dual xeon servers (it's a small high school) over their gigabit network.

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.

Re:It's a great idea, but...

[Penguinoflight]

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? :-)