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...

[SirSlud]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Problem: need support for software used by 13 year olds cheaply.

Solution: use OS software.

Possible issue: where do you get support?

Whiners: You cant, cause its all 13 year olds who know more than me and say "RTFM".

This software will be used by the very same people you say know the software really well.

Nevermind that the stereotype isn't true: I've never seen ANYBODY say RTFM on any of the following mailing lists: FreeBSD-commits, FreeBSD-hackers, Mysql, omniORB, etc, etc, etc.

Its just funny that you'd denounce the support for the software by saying the only folks you can find to support it will be the very same students that use it! HOLY FUCK, PROBLEM SOLVED, FREE SUPPORT if your stereotype is indeed true. Which it isn't.

As usual, Fort, you gotta make sure your trolls are a little more self consistant.