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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.'"
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.
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.
But not by using open source. No, instead, we use pirated software.
Clearly, this does make it possible for the BSA to close us down, but the fact is, that they will not get anything from us. We're a not for profit organisation. They know that if they sue us they'll suffer from so much bad publicity that it's not worth it. They'll not get any money from us. We have none.
It would be nice if they prosecuted. We would use as our defence that we have a licence since I clicked "I agree" when it was installed. We may then be able to prosecute them if they caused damage. Not that we'll get a lot of money. The BSA is a non-profit.
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!
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.
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
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
Funny, I was never told to RTFM when I asked for commercial support.
No, you were likely just asked for a credit card number.
Trolling is a art,
Uh-huh.
Because you just know that Apple had Congress in their pocket when my school had Turtle Logo and Number Munchers on a bunch of Apple IIe systems back in the early '80s.
Show those fscking politicians "Oregon Trail", and all they saw was dollar signs.
Hell inna handbasket. Liberals! Liberals, I tells ya! And fluoride in the water!
fnord
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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.
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
As others have said, support is close at hand with the community of both users and developers.
As the primary author behind an open-source school administrative package, I understand this situation, and I understand that if something breaks someone will need to know what's going on. That is why I have the support policy that I do -- if someone is using LISSARD (the aformentioned software), they can go through the normal channels (mailing lists, etc.) in case of a problem or they can talk to me directly by phone, even at home.
No, it's not a promise of 24x7 support. But, remember that you're not dealing with trained monkeys on the other end of an 800 number, but rather someone that no only knows what's going on but why it happens that way and knows the situation backwards and forwards. In the end, my open-source project has better support than any of the other commercial offerings, because a resolution is reached within minutes rather than hours or (in some cases) weeks.
One more thing: the support contract never needs renewing. I will help whoever is using my software, because I know what it's like to be totally ignored.
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