Slashdot Mirror
How Do I Start a University Transition To Open Source?
exmoron writes "I work at a small university (5,500 students) and am in a position to potentially influence future software purchasing decisions. I use a number of FOSS solutions at home (OpenOffice.org, Zotero, GIMP, VirtualBox). My university, on the other hand, is a Microsoft and proprietary software groupie (Vista boxes running MS Office 2007, Exchange email server, Endnote, Photoshop, Blackboard, etc.). I'd like to make an argument that going open source would save the university money and think through a gradual transition process to open source software (starting small, with something like replacing Endnote with Zotero, then MS Office with OpenOffice.org, and so on). Unfortunately, I can't find very good information online on site licenses for proprietary software. How much does a site-license for Endnote cost? What about a site license for MS Office for 2,000 computers? In short, what's the skinny on moving to open source? How much money could a university like mine save? Additionally, what other benefits are there to moving to open source that I could try to sell the university on? And what are the drawbacks (other than people whining about change)?"
Note to Mods.
Sarcasm is NOT trolling. TYVM.
Should it be their responsibility? Of course not. I wish it never was. Is it often the responsibility of some schmuck? Yes, it very often is. And the fact that Photoshop contains the approximations has saved my ass at least twice that I can think of.
It's just one off-the-top-of-my-head point making light of Mr. Belits' regularly retarded asshattery that he loves to spew. He's not really worth more than that.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
What does it mean to standardize a "workflow"? Suppose my job is to xxx that consists of yyy and zzz. Do I have to yyy before I zzz because that's how you do it? Idiot.
Results are what matter.
Newsflash: "photog" is pretty standard.
One of the worst travesties lately is community colleges that purport to teach web development, but instead of focusing on a result, are just teaching the mechanics of using specific common MSWin based packages (Photoshit, etc.).
It's a shame. It's not an education. Anyone can play around with these expensive packages, and learn how to use them, but not how to produce commercially acceptable content, which could have been created with many other different applications, many of them free and open source.
Maybe you have an agenda? Are you one of those community college teachers who don't know anything except MSWin and the expensive commercial packages?
First: "photog" sounds retarded. You don't want to sound retarded, do you?
Perhaps you'd better tell that to all of the photographers who use "photog" on Photo.net.
"Well, some people like it" is not a good fucking point to make when you're talking about how the industry works.
I've already provided links to some in the industry who do use CinePaint and other open source software. Are you saying they are all wrong?
industry standard tools--and it's what the grads want to be learning on.
Some not all, but they're not really pros because they don't use what you want them to use I guess.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?