Indiana Schools May Purchase 300K Linux Computers

GuitarNeophyte writes "According to an article at PC Magazine, Indiana School systems may soon be purchasing around 300,000 Linpire desktop computers. Linspire, via its Education Program has a straight $500-per-school (not per-seat) cost, providing an incredibly-alluring price incentive for this to happen." From the article: "Many schools across the state have already had the chance to try out desktop Linux, and everyone seems excited to get this program going...This groundbreaking initiative makes it possible for schools to afford computers for every student, something that makes a huge impact on their overall educations."

Comments

It worked for autodesk

[grozzie2]

Autodesk saw the schools as a 'market builder' early on. When I did my second stint in post secondary institutions (pc's were not common during the first), the school had a site license for AutoCad, and we all got copies to take home and use on our own pc.

A whole crop of sudents entered the workforce at a time when the move to CAD was in it's infancy, all familiar with, and able to use AutoCad. They were put in charge of the move to automation, and they all purchased AutoCad when they entered industry.

A very effective marketing strategy for a company looking beyond the next quarter.

Re:It worked for autodesk

[iluvcapra]

A very effective marketing strategy for a company looking beyond the next quarter.

It seems to have worked fantastically for Apple, but that might not be a fair comparison.

On the other hand, the earlier we start teaching kids about what the Lesser GPL is, why they need libxml2 instead of libxml1, and why all of their productivity apps are at version 0.99.91, the more comfortable they will be with these otherwise-daunting concepts.

Kidding, but only half so.

Let me know when...

[DogDude]

... when it actually happens. A PR release from the company trying to sell their stuff isn't exactly news; it's marketing.

Why linspire?...

[tregetour]

...ubuntu or such would free, even cheaper no?

Tomorrow's post -- Indiana buys MS (big discounts)

[Blahbooboo3]

...MS provided steep discounts to Indiana schools for their purchase of Microsoft software

A hard disk failure every hour, $200,000 per hour

[goombah99]

500K cheap linux boxes. This is going to be a massive number of hard drive crashes and system rebuilds per day. Why the heck dont schools use thin clients to servers. Or at least use some of those multi-headed configurations that can seat four students per box. Even the power bill makes this attractive. 500K * 200 watts = 100 Megawatts of power at 10 cents a kilowatt hour is $100,000 dollars per hour to operate. In winter time this might offset the cost of heating if they can distribute the heat, but the rest of the year the cooling costs to offset this heat load will double the operating cost. (since it usually takes one watt of cooling to offset 1 watt of heat generation) so $200,000 per hour of operation. Now imagine you had a four headed system. it would cut this cost by half to a third. Will Linspire Netboot. If not they are going to have a lot of corrupt systems to fix every day. yikes!

Why $500 per school?

[dtfinch]

Because if it was free, they wouldn't want it.

I Suppose Even Linspire Is A Step Up From MS

[John Hasler]

Great. It figures that when the schools decide to switch to Linux they would choose the worst distribution available.