Slashdot Mirror
UK Schools Warned Off Microsoft Deal
rs232 sends in a BBC piece on the UK computer agency Becta advising schools against signing up for a Microsoft educational license because of alleged anti-competitive practices. "The problem was that Microsoft required schools to have licenses for every PC in a school that might use its software, whether they were actually doing so or running something else." We have discussed Becta's role in British education here several times as they have acted as a watchdog warning of perceived Microsoft excesses.
I am a network manager in a UK school. So I do have a little knowledge on this subject. If anyone wishes to read up on exactly what a 'Schools Agreement' license entails they can do so here and/or here. If you want to get a feel for how much this scheme costs a school have a look at this thread or this one on EduGeek.
Afaict the situation goes something like.
An educational establishment has lots of PCs running various versions windows and various versions of various software some MS, some none MS, some legit, some pirate. This is a management nightmare but paying regular prices to upgrade everything would be cost prohibitive. MS comes along and offers windows and office at a very steep discount and with the right to use any version you want (the windows OS part is upgrade/downgrade only but since virtually all machines come with an OEM windows license that is not really a major issue).
However to get the products at this discount they have to sign up to terms that are not very nice. The license cost is based on some factor other than the number of machines running windows (for schools I belive it is total number of PCs, for universities I think it is total students or something like that). So there is no financial incentive to move individual machines to free software. Further the deals are often subscription based so the institution has to keep paying even if they have no desire to upgrade.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
One student at the high school I was administering discovered that even with our more prohibitive settings (many/most of those alternatives were disabled) he could simply create a shortcut to C: on a floppy disk and he was home free.
Sure, I was pissed at him, but at the same time I was impressed with the elegant simplicity of it all.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Take it from me; teachers don't administrate, and when they do all they do is mess things up. Usually pretty horribly at that. Teachers in public (elementary, secondary) schools tend towards the computer illiterate side of the fence. Some to the degree of simple uncertainty, some to the degree where they'll order a student suspended because they changed their desktop background - that's the outright fear category right there.
We've had teachers inform us, the lowly know-nothing network administrators (see, we weren't University Edumucated so what could we really know anyways?) that their lab was working PERFECTLY the day before, that NOTHING had changed, except somehow the computers wouldn't turn on anymore. Yes, of course they're plugged in! I checked it personally!
Yes, the power bars were unplugged from the wall outlets. He was correct though; the computers were in fact plugged into the power bars.
As for software administration, hoo-boy, you don't even want to go near that one.
Security? What of the teacher who used to perpetually walk from his math class to the computer lab across the hall and leave his online bank and investment site LOGGED IN all through 2nd period?
Or even common sense. Like why I, a male network administrator, would want access to the girl's phys-ed office (not the change room, the office, where the computer connected to the dead printer was).
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
I wonder if Ubuntu will replace Microsoft on school computers.
I just saw that Tesco UK is selling Ubuntu PCs as well! This is a first in England.
For those that don't live here Microsoft is the computer. For about 10 years I have never heard of anyone else using Linux in the UK (I mean walking around or in real life. Not over the internet), then this year suddenly walking around the university everyone's laptops have Ubuntu or Fedora or SUSE. Even my university has SUSE in one of their labs. Now that is a first!
There was a piece from 2005 in which it talks about the government seriously thinking of switching all its software to open source.
At work I totally blew up the security one of our tech guys work, using Internet Explorer's Help Menu. Click Help > About > System Info > Open > Right Click > Explore. If that's disabled, then it's off to View > Privacy Policy > Tell me about cookies > Tools > Internet Options > (Temporary Internet Files) Settings > View Files. Even if all the icons are gone, get Task Manager open, click Help > About > End User License Agreement (would you believe it opens NOTEPAD?!?) And to top it all off, MS Word is officially the biggest vulnerability in that type of security (can you get to the VB Editor in that? "Shell cmd.exe" is the one line that demolishes all security).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Myself and another student actually ran the Windows network at my high school. We administered the network and created the majority of the security settings on it. We were able to do it much more efficiently than the the staff, as the other students had no idea we were in charge. Other students would share their little tips and tricks with us, and we would promptly make adjustments to stop them from happening. Surprisingly, the student body never caught on (but rather thought our faculty to be particularly adept) over the 3 years my friends and I held the position. Last I heard, our basic setup was still in place, 6 years after leaving. Apparently a "spy" produced system is superior to the best they could concoct.
Just another ignorant American.