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UK Schools At Risk of Microsoft Lock-In
Robert writes "UK schools and colleges that have signed up to Microsoft Corp's academic licensing programs face the significant potential of being locked in to the company's software, according to an interim review by Becta, the UK government agency responsible for technology in education. The report also states that most establishments surveyed do not believe that Microsoft's licensing agreements provide value for money." In a separate report, Becta offered the opinion that schools should avoid Vista for at least another year, since neither Vista nor Office 2007 offers any compelling reasons for schools to upgrade.
Remember what Apple did with giving away free macs to schools so that kids used that at an early age and were familiar with them instead and thus wanted them at home? I bet Microsoft will do the same for Vista in schools everywhere but this time, instead kids won't say "aww that's cool!" they'd probably say things more like "why the hell is this taking 10 minutes to boot" (we say that at my college already) and "oh look, the IT people let us be able to do this!" since nobody's extremely familiar with all the things you have to do to Vista to make them middle school kids with technicial skills proof lol. So yeah, there's compelling reasons for Microsoft to get schools to upgrade to Vista and lock em in with a license but there's definitely tons of reasons for schools to not upgrade. And of course it's a massive waste of money that could be better spent anywhere else in the school
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
...And I fail to see how this hasn't already happened.
:p)
Props to Becta for doing such a study. They're a good thing and I like what they do for educational IT. However, we're already locked into Microsoft on the client side.
All applications that our kids use will only work on Windows. Office is the "standard" that they all get taught (yes, I've put OpenOffice on - without teachers wanting to use it, Office is the only thing used). The educational applications that they use every day will only run on Windows (and some maybe on OSX, but we're not rich enough to afford Macs, I'm afraid.)
The licensing agreements are alright - we're looking at about £28/workstation/year for ~450 machines, which is just over £12k/year for licensing. While that is a nasty chunk of money, it means we're entitled to the latest and greatest on release - as such, I've got Office 2007 and Vista on my work laptop giving them a whirl.
Wine! I hear you say Wine! Sorry, no go. We cannot risk apps not working because Wine doesn't support them fully. The teachers would eat my testicles for dinner - it's bad enough dealing with the poorly written educational software as it is, nevermind dealing with Wine on top of that.
There isn't enough scope in the Curriculum to let kids even learn about alternative operating systems. I use Linux at home exclusively for desktop use, yet at work we're using 450ish XP clients, 5 Windows-based servers and 1 Linux server (for internet caching/filtering). It annoys me that there isn't much I can do personally to let them know there are alternatives out there without running my own after school class or something, which I can't see many people wanting to attend (and I'm not the teaching type).
As for the upgrade thing - don't we know it. Office 2007 rollout isn't going to happen before September, if not 2008 (getting the teachers to put time in learning the new interface so they can teach the kids is the hard part!). Vista probably 2009 at the earliest - depending on what incompatibilites we'll come across during testing.
All in all, unless you get the application developers to start making things cross platform, we can't move to Linux/[other alternative], and until people start moving to Linux application developers won't develop applications for it! Chicken and egg problem.*
(* - I know this was solved!