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

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.

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!

Microsoft Bob here to save the day!

[infonography]

Remember kids, buying a computer without an operating system is the first step towards piracy. Act now and call BSA and report anyone who offers you a computers without a licensed operating system. Say No to Piracy.

Offer not valid outside the USA especially Finland.

Why $500 per school?

[dtfinch]

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

Re:MS already $5 at universities

[Trelane]

Microsoft has had deals for years with IU, IUPUI, Purdue, Ball State, et al. for their products. Basically, you get all their products in a few different packs for $5 each.

My school has this sweet deal too. Just a few niggling details:

If you follow the money trail, my school takes somewhere between USD30 and USD70 (or maybe more) from my fees (not tuition; the campus usage fees) per semester for the campus student licenses. So we're actually paying somewhere between USD240 and USD560 before the up-front costs (USD5 for Windows XP upgrade; USD6 or 10 for Office full version). The campus tour guides never seem to mention this point when they're talking about the program, and all the students and parents I've talked to about it had no idea these funds were being taken and sent straight to Microsoft for the software.

Additionally, your Windows is an upgrade copy of Windows only. That means that you must already have a Windows license (though it doesn't seme to check for this in any way; nice if MSFT is gonna come back and audit you to push you to License 7.0). This makes the Windows side of the license practically useless--the version of Windows you have likely works just fine for what you use it, and chances are pretty good you already have XP home, if not pro! Luckily, the MS Office and VStudio, tmk, are full versions, so it's not as useless. But whatever you got with your computer is probably just fine and works for you (nice for Microsoft if you have a competitor of theirs!) Finally, the academic prices are already dirt-cheap (relatively speaking). I don't think the MS site license is really very useful in terms of cheapening software acquisition costs!

Finally, you cannot keep the license if you don't graduate. That's right; if you quit for a while or if you're kicked out, you lose your license. Not nearly as sweet a deal as the academic price, now is it?

There are other problems with it from the university side, including problems if they ever want to stop paying Microsoft because maybe they want to standardize on Keynote or OpenOffice or something (long, expensive audit there!), but these are most of the immediately visible student-side problems.