Roadblocks to Linux in Education

An anonymous reader writes "The Open Source Industry Australia (OSIA) has lashed out at government schools and education departments for snubbing FOSS. In this column, OSIA says it has been trying for over two years to make headway with these government agencies but 'they tell me that they are scared of doing anything which will upset Microsoft.'" From the article: "If these departments suddenly stopped paying for proprietary software and switched to FOSS, the schools know they won't reap any of the purported savings. So, why would schools bother with trialling FOSS? Where's the incentive?"

Comments

Re:It's the apps, stupid!

[cyber_rigger]

Were's the vertical education apps, for all education levels?

You can start browsing here.

http://richtech.ca/seul/

Personal experience concurs

[zaxios]

One school I worked at in NSW had a network of Windows 98 boxes drowning in malware, to the extent that they were almost totally unusable -- it took literally five minutes after logging in before any program could be launched; crashes were hideously regular; Internet Explorer had shady toolbars, popups in Google and refused to open a link in a new window. Disturbed that students actually had to try and work on these computers, I told the network administrator that he should install some antispyware software and Mozilla Firefox.

As if the sorry state of the network wasn't disgusting enough, the administrator replied that he'd received a Department of Education directive which said he couldn't install any programs for which there was a Microsoft equivalent. That meant no Firefox.

So, in my experience, the impression that the article gives of our school system not forcing Microsoft to actually compete for its business is pretty much spot-on.

The Problem is Insufficient Federalism

[Nova Express]

Take a look at this passage from the article:

Most government primary and secondary schools don't care about saving costs by using cheaper alternatives. You see, they effectively pay nothing for their proprietary software -- the schools' owners, the respective Departments of Education do. And the mandarins therein don't like anything that rocks the boat, and are thus greatly threatened by Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Nothing rocks an ICT boat like FOSS does.

The larger an organization, the slower it moves. The more insulated from the free market an organization, the more bureaucratic and hidebound it is.

A federal bureaucracy is, by defintion, among the slowest and most hide-bound of organizations. Remember, all bureaucracies run not on incentives (i.e., making a profit) but on constraints (i.e., following rules). These constraints lead to organizations that are manifestly inefficient compared with their private-sector counterparts. Absent signs from the marketplace that its methods aren't working, a government agency might persist in pursuing an unsuccessful strategy for years. As James Q. Wilson notes in his book Bureaucracy, "the Ford Motor Company should not have made the Edsel, but if the government had owned Ford it would still be making Edsels." Remember, America's federal government pursued a welfare program aimed at ending poverty a full decade after it was obvious that it was having exactly the opposite of the desired effect.

In America, this problem is somewhat ameliorated by the doctrine of Federalism, which incorporates the idea of subsidiarity, i.e. that government functions should devolve to the smallest unit of government which can carry them out. The federal government should not undertake something which can be handled by a state government. A state government should not undertake a function which can be handled by a county government, etc., all the way down to, in this case, a local school board. (Let us admit here that America's system of federalism has been steadily erroded for the last 70 years or so).

By centralizing their software buying decisions in their federal educational bureaucracy, Australia's education establishment persists in error when a smaller, more nimble organization would moved on to a more optimal solution, i.e. using software which isn't an expensive, kludgy, virus-and-security hole riddled piece of crap.