Ditching Microsoft Could Save Education Millions

ElvenMonkey writes "The Times Education Supplement has published the results of a BECTA (British Educational Communications and Technology Association, the Government's ICT agency) study, to be published next week, into the TCO of using Microsoft products compared to using Open Source products. The report shows an average saving of 24% per computer in schools using Open Source over those using Microsoft systems. Now if only the government wasn't insistent on locking schools into using Microsoft in arguably illegal ways."

Comments

Skolelinux is the school linux distro...

[Compunerd]

Take a look at http://skolelinux.org/ to see what can be done to create an elemtary school distro. It's installation friendly, somehow userfriendly (KDE 2) and has nice setups for thin-client environments.

roy

What We'd Need

[ThisIsFred]

In order for this to happen, I'd need the following to happen first:

* All other agencies that communicate with my district would have to settle on a common, open document format, and stay with it. We need to read what the state sends us.

* Our student information systems would have to support something other than Microsoft products. Tell NCS/Pearson to port SASIxp/IGPro/PCXP to something other than Windows. Follet Software did it with their media circulation software. It's far from impossible.

* All other agencies need to hire something other than web developers who took a half-semester ASP programming course.

* Our accounting systems need to be ported to something other than Windows. There are no cost-effective systems that run on Linux (it's not just initial purchase, it's the support availability).

Where I could substitute with Linux, I did. It's not just Internet access and games for kids, either. Many districts are computerized from top to bottom, so the answer to "why do we need computers in schools", is "because it saves labor costs and gets the job done faster." You also might want to consider that many schools don't have full-time IT staff. Most of the available contractors are MS Certified Reset-button Pushers.