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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?"
If I'm a Microsoft Rep and you "only" have a few thousand seats, you ain't playing hardball with me. I'll tell you to fuck off, and then you can go and beg to your boss for the SUBSTANTIAL budget increase that it would require to deploy RedHat/SuSE. If you manage to keep your job, you'll be crawling back eventually.
Maybe you are ignorant that Linux vendors charge you annually until the end of time.
And Microsoft doesn't?
That is mostly related to Windows reacting in totally braindead ways to changes in configuration. In Linux you change a setting and it just works, in Windows you change a setting and it might work if you are lucky, it might change nothing at all or it might totally fuck up your computer (the same setting) depending on factors invisible to the user and the skilled admin. I switched to Linux for everything but Games for this reason about a year ago and I begin to notice now, when someone asks me to solve their windows problems, that I just don't have to solutions to the newest problems memorized and there is no way to find them out on your own when you are not up to date with windows related news. There is a reason reinstallation is so popular for solving windows problems and it is not the totally deterministic behaviour of windows.
Linux is not Windows