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Linux Desktops in New Zealand Schools
nigelr writes "The New Zealand Ministry of Education has signed a deal with Novell New Zealand to provide SUSE Linux desktop licenses in schools. The article claims that while the price for a desktop license now matches what Microsoft charge, the new deal will significantly reduce the over all cost due to reduced charges for existing Novell products used in schools around the country."
of Linux that it's free and all that jazz? I mean... paying for it takes away a whole lot of the attractiveness IMHO.
Why are they using a distro that has licensing fees at all? I mean, if you're going to migrate to Linux, why wouldn't you choose a free distro like Ubuntu, and if you needed support you could always urchase it from Canonical...
Not meant as a troll, or even "Distro X > Distro Y", but I don't see what it would be about SuSE that would make New Zealand schools choose them.
PLUS, if they're just now reaching the prices that microsoft charges... why change? You're not saving any money at this point, and you have the costs of migrating everything. I can see if the Linux migration was to free licenses, but "hey, its the same price!" wouldn't make me jump on the Linux boat.
When the guru tried to give it away for free, he was ignored.
When he started SELLING "training" for insane prices, it became all the rage.
As a kiwi student, I'm saddened by this news, :-(
my hacking of unsecure school network systems days are over
But on the otherhand it is good to see the playing field levelled.
http://www.nbr.co.nz/home/column_article.asp?id=12 417&cid=3
My take - I'm a student at Perth, Western Australia. My school recently got a whole bunch of iMac G5's, and Panther, and they are a nice set of machines. I run a heavily customized ubuntu/Gnome 2.10 setup at home and I would have to say that OS X is all that it's cracked up to be. It has a great interface and file/folder management system (finder), is stable, and seems to be easy to administrate (given that the sysadmins seem to do little work :D).
It's a great choice for a school desktop, due to it's ease of use and solid support base. I use Linux at home and prefer it's data management capabilities, but there will always be a place for OS X in my heart.
At least until the GNOME team creates an expose-like function
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
The problem is, no matter what kind of platform you use, the ease of maintenance has a pretty big impact on how much it costs. The 'free' part of Linux is nice for individual users or companies who have full-time IT staff, but for a school I think using a distro where they get support is a good choice. School IT staff is usually running tight as it is. Plus, now those kids will have a chance to learn something besides Windows at a younger age. I'm sure they'll get Windows exposeure elsewhere, so now they won't be locked into the 'Windows is all that I know, so let's use windows' pattern later.
In a few years, people will no longer be saying, "everyone knows Windows... we expect new employees to know Windoze... it would cost too much to re-train our staff who only know Whindoes..."
It's the beginning of the end of the desktop monopoly. Kids will no longer be programmed with a view to maintaining the power structures of the status quo.
Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird -- Proverbs 1:17
There's a big underswell push for Linux in schools happening around the UK too...
Times Educational Suppliment ran it a few weeks ago. You needed the paper version for the full article but this is a good summary and primer: http://www.tes.co.uk/2094985
Now... Can everyone who has kids in the UK start asking the teachers about this at their next school visit?
It's a pretty well known fact that if you TEACH *CHILDREN* to use Linux and not Windows from the start, it will filter up through the years and (with any luck) become the system of choice in the home too... Then the last 'bastion' will be industry... and with 1000's of up and coming children leaving schools with skills fully developed in Linux, the old excuse of 'training' kinda starts working against Microsoft. 'Cause none of the kids use it (nor want to). It's the same trick Microsoft used (Free O/S etc for schools).
Hope I haven't failed to explain in enough detail all of this, and you can all 'join the dots' and see where this might be going.
So... Start hassling your teachers NOW. I personally *am* getting involved in a new school to get all their computers on Linux from the start. When it opens in September.
If you're *serious* about wanting to see a less monopolostic computing environment, but don't know where you should put your effort in to help... This is the place... IMO
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The Novell deals lets schools buy software for the same cost as Microsoft products, about $99 per product per server for a year-long licence.
v er/pricing.html
This is a strange statement, due to TFA later saying the following:
The ministry won't comment on the cost of the contract.
Further investigation to this shows the following server costs from Novell's site:
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxenterpriseser
These are all non-haggled prices, too. There is nothing on there for $99, and I wouldn't think that they would be buying new servers just to change over the OS. Elseware I saw that these prices are supposed to include one year of matenence as well. Either I really missed something, or there is a flaw in Mr. Schwarz's journalism. Anybody have any insite into this little paradox?
Vol~
I guess the point here is that instead of having a solid Debian or a powerful Gentoo GNU/Linux, institution, companies, schools, prefer to have technical assistance and a commercial product in general, which will then be open source.
Do not forget that together with the SuSe package (that I do not really like myself) it comes a very well organized guide oriented for that distribution in particular, plus they have a phone number to call if they want professional help.
On the other hand, if the system adminnistrator was good enough to do everything in his own, he could have install e Debian through the whole netowrk, asking help to the community when needed. But that doesn't happen often, so you get these commercial packages.
I do not think that this is a problem, as long as it is Linux and not some creepy linux-similar distribution with tons of closed source application is fine to me.
Regardsthe contract could be for 500 Suse licenses -- like .0042% of New Zealand's 120,000 computers. The article doesn't say. Considering that the "three-year licensing contract with Microsoft, Apple and Computer Associates signed [by the ministry] last year was worth $27.5 million" there's no way Linux is going to be the primary desktop OS for NZ schools. At $99 a licence it would only take about $12 million of that $27.5 to make every one of those 120,000 computers a microsoft seat.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I know that you've been modded down as a troll, but you have a good point, and even though I disagree with it, I think your post deserves an answer, not a troll mod.
I don't know if any of you noticed, but Linux only has about a 1% share of the desktop market. What is the point of teaching these kids to use a system that nobody else does?
Yes, Linux doesn't have a large share of the desktop market, but it's got a very large piece of the server pie, and is also prevalent in areas like supercomputing involved in scientific research. So the notion that learning Linux has no practical application in the "real world" is simply false. If these kids are doing tech support for the general public, yes, Windows is the system they should learn; if they're writing a program for a scientist to be executed on a cluster of Linux boxes (the job I happen to have right now), Linux is more appropriate.
However, even this is not necessarily relevant. If these kids are supposed to be learning academics (as opposed to vocational training), the operating system is really not that important in terms of how well the kids will learn. A mouse behaves about the same on Windows as on Linux, most of the skills involved in using Office are applicable to OpenOffice.org, etc. The concepts of computer science, for example, are platform-independent, no matter whether you like programming with vi/emacs or Visual Studio. So even programmers, those who have as much to do with computers as anyone, will become just as good programmers no matter which platform they learn on.
So what I'm saying is that in terms of educational value, if students learn Windows or learn Unix, it makes little difference. Also, many of these machines will be servers and computers that students won't come into contact with, and therefore they deserve an OS chosen purely on technical merits.
So, in a nutshell, what I'm saying is that the schools should get what they think is best, whether it's Windows or Linux. Their job isn't to help Microsoft maintain a monopoly just because they already have one.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.
There are loadsa girls out there who are very grateful for being freed from Claria/Gator/MSIE :-p
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
then those who ruled by ignorance get phased out by attrition, or the society self-destructs.
Bill G. had one chance to pull the wool over people's eyes, and now the evidence is in front of everybody.
So the GP is right. Either Microsoft throws off the Bill & Steve act, or Microsoft gets plowed into the ground in the next five to ten years as the kids who know _why_ their parent's boxes are full of malware grow up.
And that's not counting the people outside the US and Japan who haven't become numb by constant exposure to MSWindows, who expect computing equipment to actually meet spec.
What applications? Which job?
Superior by what criteria?
Superior for what purpose?
Superior according to whom?
Vastly by what scale of measurement?
If you think you have a point, support it!
It's rarely sound policy to make purchasing decisions based purely on adjectives and adverbs.As the GP mentioned, for the purposes of teaching general computer skills, the choice of OS is of little difference. Skills gained on OpenOffice will be readily transferrable to Office. The desktop metaphor isn't so very different that it's going to cause problems either.
And this way the kids get exposed to some alternatives to MS and don't leave school thinking computing begins and ends at Redmond. That's a good reason in its own right.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
But since the thread is talking about basic users the problem is simpler. It's not a matter of users being lazy. It a matter of the changes being unnecessary. And they're not going to do their own changes anyway, that's the job of IT support.
Face it, Win95/NT/2000/XP/2003 all have different interfaces and behaviors. It's not like dropping a new kernel or even an new OS behind KDE or Gnome: on MS-Windows everything changes. When you change from one version of MS-Windows to another, your basic users will be inconvenienced by it and not like it. Ask them in a non-threatening way, you'll find they do not like the changes in the interface, especially when they're using the computer for exactly the same tasks as before. With a linux distro, they can keep the same GUI behavior and menus -- even in many applications -- for years longer and concentrate on their work rather than learning a new interface.
So, I say again, inconvenience from upgrades is unnecessary for the basic user. Most of these basic users have a computer on their desk to write reports, letters or memos, work a spreadsheet, use e-mail, use the WWW, or print something from any of the above. There's no real reason any of that has to change so often, especially the computer's GUI and applications. In fact if the user is happy with the functionality, then same system and applications could be used indefinitely and there should be no reason to do anything other than the occasional security patch. And a patch should not affect functionality unless some unethical bastard decided to piggyback non-security related stuff into it.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Sorry folks, but I don't get it yet. Reading even the article I don't know what they are talking about.
Novell bought SUSE and now offers the following products:
What is also looking very strange to me is the emphasis of the name SUSE. If you visited the LinuxTag2005 in Germany then you would have noticed that there were not much traces of the brand "SUSE" any more and the Novell presence was limited to one PC at the HP pavillion. That gave a very clear impression that Novell is trying hard to get the name SUSE out of the head of the people, and now not even 4 weeks later they sell SUSE Linux to New Zealand? I'm a bit puzzled.
The deal is certainly a very interesting option, but there are numerous problems to overcome:
The educational space is very MS application specific, and I'm not joking about this.
With the MS deal having appeared first, I discovered that naturally the school I started working at has a very tight W2k3 infrastructure, based around Active Directory ( not pretty, but it does work when you find out all the undocumented "features" ). Breaking this structure down to work with Linux boxes is currently not an option, I'd simply not be able to get clearence.
I've been trying to get Linux into the school more prominently, but with myself being the only guy with Linux system expertise this is a wee bit hard. Some of the more liberal departments are running Linux specifically for some courses, as it forces the kids to think outside the box [ The Young Enterprise course and their companies have been the benefactors of Mandrake 10.1 ].
The kids have unfortunately bypassed the command prompt stage, so they have no idea about the underlying power of any OS, let alone windows. I'm trying to train a geek squad now, but it's a bit embarrassing for them when they don't even know the dir command... does this matter some may ask? Well it certainly matters when you run 90% of the system updates at high speed through batch scripting.
Right now all schools are currently sorting out which administration packages they will use, some are fine, but most face transferring to a new system at great expense. This requires re-training and immense additional expense in the IT budget, money which does not flow into getting a Linux solution in place.
From what I read, Kirstin school currently has a 50% install base of Linux, I think it was SuSe, and they duel boot their systems for the best of both worlds. I don't have that option, they have about seven technicians for about 350 PC's ( and about 1200 student laptops ), I am one head technician dealing with roughly 450 PC's, and roughly 70 Laptops. I simply cannot train everyone to be able to effectively use it.
However, it's not all doom and gloom, I'm not one to run away from a challenge, and this looks suitably difficult to implement. There is nothing more boring than having everything running smoothly; the kids provide ample entertainment with destroyed PC's and other miscellaneous problems, something which attracted me to the area I work in today [ oh, and lets not even begin people and kids bringing in PC's infected with spyware + viruses ].
Regards,
Nuke Bloodaxe.
Preach it, brother. I have been endlessly cursed by an early exposure to a Timex ZX-81 and Commodore 64, and may never recover from once having owned an Amiga. Oh, my kingdom for the ability to somehow acquire new skills that are similar to the ones I already have!
No, I want my kids learning XP and only XP, and that's been my opinion ever since the United Nations declared it the One True OS For Posterity. I don't want them to look back with shame and horror on the weird systems of their youth as they attempt to learn the Windows path 30 years from now (which will be exactly identical in to current systems - how could we ask them to cope with change?).
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I work in a medium size district in the US. We have approximately 12,000 students. One of my duties is to repackage software into an .msi format so it can be deployed throughout the district in a Windows environment. Currently we have about 120 different software apps that are used throughout all the grades. I have yet to see a piece of software come across my desk that has Linux listed under the system requirements.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see Linux in our district. It's my main OS at home but how do you tell teachers and board members that "yeah, we're going to convert to a better OS that will potentially cost less.....but you know, you might lose a few apps". That wouldn't fly and I'd find my butt out on the street looking for a new job.
I'd love to hear how school district are over-coming the software issue (besides using Wine...). Until textbook and other educational companies start providing Linux apps, I can't even think about deploying Linux on the desktop.
Also novell was/is quite costly for schools, we were thinking of changing but the cost was just too great, if this new deal helps get more novell servers out there instead of windows servers I am all for it. But the real question is who really is going to support this? I mean you do need someone there that knows what they are doing I mean are you going to call novell every time you need a user created? A lot of the tech's that work at schools in Australia are just out of school and are in traineeships, who is going to teach them to use a Novell server or to configure a Linux desktop?
at any rate I'm glad there is finally some action from the Novell front, quite possibly the only real chance for an alternative in the business and governement sector.