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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?"
Afraid to upset MS? What have they got against saving money? Sounds like some people in education need to get their asses fired.
Tech Public Policy stuff
It's true that by switching to FOSS now, they won't save anything, today. They've already paid for the proprietary software. The real savings comes in the next year or two when they don't have to pay for new software to stay on the proprietary upgrade path and they won't have to pay for new hardware to meet the demands of the new software.
It sounds like these government schools are being a little short-sighted in their reasoning.
Teaching children GNU/Linux and other free software exclusively will merely limit their employment opportunities.
Teaching it alongside Microsoft software would be great. However, it is unlikely that schools that do such would continue to receive discount prices on Microsoft products.
Why not? Shouldn't students be able to make their own choice after being presented with all of the options?
If it's reached the point where you are scared of upsetting your sole source for software you depend upon, that's a clear sign you need to GET OUT NOW!
- Always spend at least 5% more than your budget (so you'll get more next budget cycle).
- Never underspend your budget (or they'll trim your budget in the next budget cycle!)
- The department director with the biggest budget wins.
Nuff said.007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
Were's the vertical education apps, for all education levels?
You can start browsing here.
http://richtech.ca/seul/
Perhaps a dual-boot scenario in a few labs until the brass/big-wigs become comfortable with the idea of a complete migration?
Sadly, kids need skills with Windows, specifically its office applicatons for jobs and the real world(tm) in general. I can't get hired by some places because I've refused to learn how to learn some MS products.
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
Sounds just like our stance towards the US when they moved into Iraq. "Oh, we don't want to annoy America, so we'll piss off the general Australian population instead."
Your "industry standards" comment is simplistic mantra chanting. How about if all the schools using Microsoft Word decide tomorrow to use RTF for saving doc's would you be happy then ? It's an industry standard, right ? Or are you championing the idea of 100's of thousands of students being able to view the source code of their word processor. Gee, that'd be handy. Lastly, anybody who's actually used both openoffice and Microsoft Office will tell you that the latter is a superior offering apart from the price. Maybe you're advocating mediocrity for our kids.
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.
Aren't you supposed to rip band-aids off quickly and get it over with?
The extra "E" is to keep the mosquitos away!
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
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.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
This is a relatively easy switch, and it's amazing most don't make it. First, start by switching to Firefox and OpenOffice. You already start saving money on MS Office licenses. Once people get used to using these apps on Windows, you switch out the OS underneath, and the learning curve is extremely limited. These are high school kids and younger, they aren't regularly demanding Visual C++ and MS Project software, they need to write papers and do web research. Doing that on Linux is a breeze, and people need to stop treating it like EVERY aspect is hard. It's not. If you wanna be a developer, sure, there are more hoops to jump through, but I don't see this being a big issue with grade schools, and by the time it is Linux will be even more polished than it is now.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
I've had extensive experience with use of FOSS in Victorian Schools, or rather, the lack of.
The crux of the matter is, most educational software ('games', if you will), comes for Windows. True, there are alternatives for Linux, but the teachers hear on the grapevine from one another about the popular packages (i.e. Windows-based).
On the server end, many Victorian schools use WinNT/2k/2003, as the licensing arrangements with Microsoft give them basically free OS licenses. All they pay for is the media. There's an instant reason for them not to change - they won't be saving much, as you can find a MCSE going for much less than a unix sysadmin.
On the other side, a few schools are moving towards Linux on the server end - the school that I previously worked at had a number of Linux servers for fileserving, web, proxy etc. OSS can be utilised heavily on the server side, and is being pushed from the top (Dept. of Education) - a prebuilt proxy/wireless authentication box, "Edupass", is being sent to all schools, complete with documentation.
There are inroads being made with OSS to Victorian Schools, but on the client side, nothing will happen until schools are willing to undertake PD with staff on how to use Linux, and there is sufficient educational software available.
Unless you learn to play the game, you will never succeed in government.
When it comes to schools, two things matter, saving the children, and the teacher's lobby. The debate needs to be framed in the way that the opposition has been framing it since they first entered the sector. You need to put FOSS savings in terms that teachers understand, and in terms that parents and others with vested interests in schools understand. Therefore, the next fiscal crises (there is one everytime new taxes are considered, the beginning of every school year, sweeps weeks at the news networks, everytime school employee contracts come up for renewal, etc) put FOSS in terms that the target audience understands. When teachers' jobs are threatened as justification for a tax increase, translate the fiscal savings from FOSS into the number of teaching positions saved. Translate FOSS into an alternative to a proposed unpopular tax or tax increase to save teaching positions. Translate FOSS savings into lower class sizes when the inevitable scandal breaks out on increasing class sizes. Translate FOSS into saving the children.
When the teachers' lobbies are faced with firm resistance on tax increases to subsidize their jobs, and are presented with an alternative method to save millions of dollars which can then be used to save the jobs, and that is the only alternative they can grasp at to save those jobs, watch how fast they'll change their tune.
Forget a tour on trying to explain FOSS savings or savings from lock-in. Just be ready and take action when the threat of teaching positions being eliminated rears its head, and then go on a country wide tour with every television news station, every radio station, every network station on how FOSS savings can save those precious teaching jobs. And be prepared to back it up with simple, concrete examples of other nations that have taken the FOSS plunge and have actual savings to speak of. Brazil, Argentina, Extremadura Spain, other countries that speak your country's native language, etc.
When the teachers' job saving opportunity arises, write letters to the editor asking why your local DOE head refuses to use FOSS software to save money that could be used to save those teaching positions. If relevant, ask why the higher ranked person in the central government, ask why their agency get to reap savings on using FOSS for their computers (ie: file servers, web servers), and yet they won't let the schools, the teachers, the children benefit from the same software. Write the letters to the editors of major news organizations in your country. Now with blogs and email there is more direct contact with reporters. Ask them the same questions. Maybe they'll ask your questions of the legislator during their next interview.
As a school district employee I tell you why. Microsoft cuts us some sweet deals on our software. They make it worth our while to keep using them. Beside how do you think teachers would take it when I said "Sorry, but Accelerated Reader won't work on Linux" or "Whoops, SASI isn't supported without using wine. And you need Libs X, Y and Z to run it. Guess you'll have to do attendance the old fashioned way." Microsoft is best at ease of use and wide application support, I would have ten times the headaches moving to linux as I have running windows. Plus with Websense and a kick ass firewall we rarely fall victim to spyware and virii. So it's a non-issue.
Although we still have pentium ones around and it would be nice to move from windows 95 to Linux. But even though teachers may teach, I found they hate to be taught.
The error with your logic is that it's not just Linux applies in your ABC, but any operating system, including Windows.
As for the economics, conceding that both have maintenance costs, that rules out A. The fact that Microsoft will be releasing a new and different interface in the next version of Windows and Office, rule out B. Finally, Linux on a partition is no more a threat (and I'm sure many would argue it's less a threat) than having Windows on a partition, so that rules out C.
Here is some real economics for your situation. Your computer lab has 125 computers. The next OS upgrade from Microsoft will cost, say $100 to upgrade. That's $12,500. Upgrade to the next version of Office at the same time, to eliminate incompatabilities with the new OS, of course, say another $100 per machine, so another $12,500.
So far we are at $25,000. Now, this is assuming that you pay the same to install Windows as you would Linux, etc. So these costs don't really factor in, nor do maintenance costs, as both systems have these. The $25,000 is just the cost of new software.
Of course, we are assuming that your then three year old computers will have enough power to run all of this new software, chances are it won't or won't for long. So, you buy 125 brand new Dell computers for $500 each, or another $62,500. This time you will need to pay someone to install these and haul away the old, so figure another $100/machine for an additional $12,500. None of this would be required with Linux or one of the other FOSS operating systems and software.
To make a long story short, your computer lab, just to stay compatable with Microsoft will cost $100,000 more than switching to FOSS. Repeat this process every three years to maintain the upgrade cycle and you will see the true cost of your computer lab staying proprietary.
City College of San Francisco converted some years ago to the Banner college MIS system made by SCT (recently bought by SunGard). The system cost over a mill (IRRC); annual license fee in the neighborhood of $150K - which is supposedly for support as well, right?
Well, the school pays a consulting firm ANOTHER $115,000 - just now raised ANOTHER $80,000 to $195,000 - for ACTUAL support. And this just to "finish the upgrade to Banner 6" - and now they're talking Banner 7.
The consulting firm gets to recommend itself every year for a new contract...Nice racket.
If the school had any brains, they would hire somebody (like me) to bring the system in-house over a period of 2-5 years, and subsequently save themselves $250-300K a year (not to mention license fees for Oracle, HP/UX, HP servers, etc.) - not to mention getting a higher quality product.
And now, despite the presence of tons of successful OSS workflow packages, they want to go out and spend another God knows how much (figure I heard was $250K) on a commercial workflow package.
The library spent $100K on a new integrated library system (ILS) on the contractual condition that the vendor integrate it with the Banner system. Banner is complex enough that it is not likely the vendor will do this, resulting in a reneg on the contract, for which they will undoubtedly offer a small rebate as an incentive. Then they'll raise the maintenance fee (around 12% is standard for the ILS industry) to recoup. Standard software business tactics. The library will undoubtedly knuckle under.
All of this is invariably justified under the rubric "support", as in "Who will support the system?" Translation: Our ITS department doesn't know what it's doing, doesn't care to find out, and we are too timid to look at alternative support mechanism such as second-sourcing support or - heaven forbid - actually developing the stuff inhouse and KNOWING how it works so support is also inhouse.
It's bullshit. It's amateur night. I don't care how many corporate types weigh in with "Yeah, but they're right - support is all-important!"
It's not. And as SCT - and Microsoft - has proven, you don't get support from commercial software vendors. You get promises.
I read an article recently about a company that switched to OSS software and was very worried about support - until they found out the stuff "just works" - and they don't need support other than what can be provided by the OSS community which developed the software.
People in government organizations like schools don't care - because it isn't their money and it isn't their jobs because it's very hard to get fired from a City job after you've been around a while. So they always take the easy way out - and when it doesn't work, they either ignore it or they just spread the blame around and let it talk itself out - after first being talked to death BEFORE it was implemented (usually for years.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Requirements Specification for Educational Document Retreival System. (Web Browser):
Software must retrieve documents from Internetwork Uniform Resource Locators.
Software much display said documents using standard HyperText Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets.
Software must allow multiple documents to be presented simultainiously within a single instance. (tabbed browsing)
Software must not allow executable modules to contaminate the base operating system. (no ActiveX)
I agree.
I'm no MS troll, but I don't think this is that good of an idea. Most system admins at public schools are used to MS. They would be useless on linux boxes. Same with teachers, same with the school's staff. If we push this too soon, we will give linux a bad name for a very long time.
Remember, only fools rush in.
"A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes." -Mahatma Gandhi
Many teachers are technologically backward (by choice or because they don't have the time) and thus some very basic things that the kids can do are very difficult from them to handle. It's one thing saying to give the kid a Linux box and high-speed internet and quite another to tell someone from his parents' or grandparents' generation.
And all those (generally) useless educational games are basically solely for Windows (or Mac).
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
Schools that I know, which are Florida schools so bottom of barrel, aren't run by the most tech literate or most intelligent people. They're run by principals who could easily be a life-long middle manager somewhere, never rising above his position. What will he do when he needs tech resources? He'll look to well-known names and people with certifications from well-known names. Yes, they'll hire MCSAs. I'm not saying OSS is difficult. In fact, I find Linux to be simpler. However, mention the words "compile", "code", and "command-line" these MCSAs will freak out. Plus they want the job security of all Microsoft shop. Essentially, you have a tech clueless principal hiring someone who's barely competent with a recognizable certification to do IT. Can he get it to work? Yeah. That's what Microsoft aims for. Even the dumbest of us can build a network with Microsoft products. Is it going to be good? Not really. I remember how easy it was for us to bypass all their "security" features. In fact, my friend email-bombed the principal using the school's own mail server. You think any of these people involved in the decision making is going to risk trying something different? If they go Microsoft and it blows up, they can always blame Microsoft. Anyone will accept blaming Microsoft. If they go with OSS and it blows up, what the hell were they doing with "cheap" software with no corporate backing? In PHPs' minds, a corporate logo is a stamp of approval.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
We have several computers lying around the house. Anytime I see a PIII or beter, at a garage sale or pawnshop I buy the damn thing. As well, I have several highend machines in the household. With my daughters (9 and 4), they make very little distinction between the underlying OS. My 9 year old in particular loves wikipedia and chatting with her girl pals.... We have: Windows XP : IE, Firefox and Trillian Mac OS X : Safari, Firefox and Fire (multui client chat) Linux : Firefoxand gaim. guess which one shes uses the most? The one with the best looking monitor.. she could care less about the differences between the OS's. I moved the 17 inch LCD she loved around to all flavors of OS and she followed the monitor not the OS. It was a unique experience. She now have a little X-Terminal in her roow (with a modest 15 inch LCD she loves). When I finally asked what OS she liked the best, her answer was somewhat amusing. She cose Mac OS X because the mac mini was cuter than the others. Kids adapt as long as the apps are there, it's us adults that muck things up.
My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.
MS probably has a lot of governments on the ropes. Think about it for a minute. MS is a foreign investor in many countries. It is cheaper to pay MS for software than it is to annoy Microsoft and lose millions of foreign investment capital
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I work for a state educational service district, and many of our schools pay for Microsoft School Agreement purely out of fear.
One of our schools was being courted by Microsoft last year, and the district politely gave Microsoft the finger, explaining that between Open Source software, pre-installed Windows OSes and Microsoft Select licensing they were perfectly happy with their current licensing and budget.
Two weeks later the Business Software Alliance came knocking. Three months of legwork and tracking down purchase orders and the district is facing a five-figure fine (and grateful it wasn't six) because of one copy of a piece of software they believe came pre-installed on a beige box workstation but can no longer prove it.
The average district would be looking at seven figures based solely on the decade-old workstations no longer networked, sitting in the corners of their elementary schools and probably stuffed with bargain bin titles from the local superstore.
Though under a dozen of our districts have been audited, not one of our School Agreement schools has been contacted. News like that travels around.
Could it be prevented with Open Source software adoption? Sure. But as other posters point out, public pressure to adopt industry standards and internal pressures to support proprietary curricular software are too strong for district support personnel to take a stand.
Unfortunately, they're also the first ones out the door when the lawyers and that five-figure fine comes.
"A district running this proprietary Windows-only software would need to find somebody that makes a Linux version of student management software, dump the old software (money down the drain), redesign their tech infrastructure to fit the new software's requirements, retrain everybody in the district (notably, most districts seem to have finally on training their staff in tech - this would mean starting from scratch again), AND converting/importing all the old data from the windows software package to the new linux software package."
This is exactly the case with City College of San Francisco, as I mentioned in another post elsewhere. They spent a million on SCT Banner to manage the school, another $150K/year on "support", then they spend another $195K/year to a consultantcy to get REAL support.
The fact of the matter is that the entire system could be re-engineered inhouse over a couple of years. Why not? The school isn't going anywhere, there's no time pressure to get it done by any specific time. Then turn it into an OSS project under the GPL, so that the rest of the industry can benefit. This is how OSS is DONE, folks!
There's no need to find a Linux equivalent for ANYTHING EXCEPT certain tools needed to BUILD an appropriate system (which is basically Java and the tons of OSS database, middleware and workflow products that exist for Java.)
This is where everybody who cites the costs of conversion goes wrong.
You DO NOT do conversion - you do RE-ENGINEERING on a carefully budgeted project over time.
The end result is you own and control the software running your operation, AND from then on, you save the license fees (and more importantly, you save the money wasted on doing things the vendor's way rather than YOUR way.)
Everybody in OSS needs to start IGNORING the so-called "conversion costs" and start emphasizing the inevitability of the need to either replace existing software with re-engineered in-house or OSS software - or spend pointless amounts of money for licensing and "support" forever. Start doing "present value" and "opportunities costs" calculations, I guess.
The crap software you're using now is costing you money and will continue to cost you money forever. Re-engineering WILL cost you less money in the long run.
It's that simple.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Sadly, things are similar in Canada. While education funding agencies (the provincial education ministries in the Canadian system) are motivated by saving money, sadly, schools are often not. And this is despite tight budgets being the norm across the board. A fellow in the energy conservation services business and I (I am in IT consulting) were recently exchanging notes on our recent experiences working with schools. We had both independently come to the conclusion that schools are not motivated by economics, despite, paradoxically, being vocal about inadequate funding. It means very little to a school principal that you have a proposal (for energy savings or IT) that will save a large school board millions of dollars over two or three years, as it means little or no money for his or her school's budget. In Canada, there is currently a prevalence of "school based budgeting" where the bulk of funding received by a school board is distributed to the schools to do with as they see fit. This eliminates almost all opportunity for initiatives that realize efficiencies due to scale, such as significant FOSS deployments.
i just want to play go
You did realize that the parent poster already stated that Zenworks for Linux SUCKS compared to the Windows implementation, right?
I think it might make more sense to phase in F/OSS, rather than making a sudden switch.
Start putting Linux in this lab, or that. Use it a leverage against msft. Start using non-msft apps as often as possible: openoffice, firefox, etc.
But, if that is the case, then you don't need to figure in support costs for Linux or BSD, either. All that is left is the software/hardware acquisitions costs and it has been shown time and time again, that in those areas Linux is a fraction of the cost.
Even in Microsoft's own studies, where they show MIcrosoft to be cheaper, it's only when you figure in the support costs (and they use highly inflated Linux ones, at that).
In a Linux/BSD solutions, the machines that were in the lab wouldn't have to go to secondary purposes, they could still be used.
The problem is that most educators don't know enough about computers to make intelligent decisions. So, they rely on school boards which have even less experience and recommend what the individuals use at work -- Windows. Or worse yet, they contract with a consultant to make the decisions and almost always end up with a company who is in the business of selling Microsoft products. It's kind of hard to give an un-biased recommendation when your livelyhood is dependent on Microsoft alone.