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Free Software For All Russian Schools In Jeopardy
Glyn Moody writes "Last year, we discussed here a Russian plan to install free software in all its schools. Seems things aren't going so well. Funds for the project have been cut back, some of the free software discs already sent out were faulty, and — inevitably — Microsoft has agreed to a 'special price' for Windows XP used in Russian schools."
Free software costs too much? Really?
Somebody needs to explain some things to these folks. It's not that hard: you install LTSP on a server, all the clients boot to the network. Install all the software you want on the server. If instead of (or in addition to) thin client/shared desktop you want an image on the desktop you configure the PXE server to dish an installer image.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This is business as usual for governments and Microsoft. The government in question threatens to roll out an open source solution to a large number of machines, problems magically pop up early in the deployment, and Microsoft pitches their solution for next to nothing in upfront costs. Note that the ongoing costs of managing the deployment down the road are virtually never considered, and the taxpayers wind up getting screwed with a "solution" that eats up enormous amounts of money in overhead, future licensing fees, and security issues.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
In Soviet Russia, free costs money!
It almost smells like sabotage. I imagine MS wouldn't directly do it, but instead pay people to "keep an eye on the project" with a lot of wink-wink. I wonder if there's not a way to donate to the cause?
Table-ized A.I.
Moody says:
Finally, Microsoft has been up to its old tricks of offering special deals for its software
How is that a "trick"? Isn't that what competition is supposed to do--cause vendors to lower price?
I'm currently working on a video game project I can finish in a couple months that may make me some money so I can support myself and do other more ambitious projects. The #1 project I feel that needs to be done is the freeing up of textbooks in education. If someone doesn't offer a free textbook that is important, we should have a community that rewrites it without plagurizing, and then provide it free of charge. The Internet should be a global library. The old problem with distribution was printing, but that problem is solved. Publishers like newspapers have less importance in this society. The new problem is compensating people who provide free information, but this problem is less of a problem than restricting their information from eager minds.
My theory is that computers can do books better than books do books. We can have multimedia experiences yes, but we're so new at knowing how they help people learn, we don't need to consider them at first. We need to do books, and link a course together by the books people need to tackle to get through them. We can have videos that train people like lectures. We can have LOTS of redudandant passive learning eventually. We can even have live tutors through live chat and email. There is a definite revolution in education looming at the horizon, and I hope that I'm not the only one who sees it because I'm horrendous at being able to accomplish big projects on my own, with no funding.
God spoke to me.
Offer free use of the bandwidth from 5pm to 7am (or whatever off hours are over there) in exchange for a usable school system. I guess if they must have a bunch of shady sites and scammers, might as well get some education out of it.
In Soviet Russia, spam funds school!
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Let's remember the original cause of this Linux migration, shall we?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You're trying to offer DDOS (Disk Delivery Overseas Service) to Russia?
i get the feeling its not just microsoft being "clever" in always offering highly discounted versions as a last resort to prevent a free software takeover. it is also governments who cleverly threat to switch to free software (back up by some actual action), on which microsoft drastically cuts price.
i think the same about china for instance. they wanted to put the whole government and education system on their red flag linux. microsoft now gives them windows+office for a couple of euros (or even less i forgot) per machine.
so i suspect free software is used as a threat in order to make microsoft cut its prices. is that a problem? i think it contributes to free software's growth in the end -- but it is surely not as beneficent as the free software actually being used to run on computers.
I've noticed costs for retraining somehow are never an issue when changing from eg., MS Office 2003 to 2007, or XP to Win7, but are showstoppers when open source software is involved.
- Chuq
Not really.. it's not robust competition from MS. It's a special temporary deal to try to dissuade them from going to free sw.
Once they're using MS sw, they'll be locked in pretty quickly and can't switch, the price will shoot right back up immediately.
Microsoft gives the schools free software and Russian students learn to use it. They get the Microsoft propaganda (Lower TCO, innovative, how easy is is to do ... etc). In a few years these students are the experts and will be working in government, industry and where ever. When they are asked how to solve a problem they will usually recommend Microsoft because that is what they know. Now had they been trained on OSS they would recommend that.
This is a quite a bargain for Microsoft, even if they give the schools free software forever. If it works for them a large part of Russia will be using and paying for Microsoft software, just like here.
Everyone wins, except, of course, the people who use the computers.
No, computer users win, too.
I've just recently largely gone back to XP from a combination of using Arch Linux, and FreeBSD since May. Every time I try and use Linux long term, I inevitably end up going back to Windows, purely due to the amount of sheer misery it causes me. Why?
a) The "community." This is the single biggest issue. As a group, Linux users are among the most toxic, hateful, myopic, delusional, generally vile human beings on the face of the planet. Stallman's cult, and the people defending it, gets really old after a while. The persistent, ongoing hatred of Microsoft is also as pathetic as it is toxic, especially when it mostly consists of arguments which were relevant in 1999, but really aren't now at all.
The icing on the cake here, is the scenario where the FSF's boosters refuse to accept the fact that the only basis for their belief system is pure, raw Stallmanite mind control. The FSF's perspective isn't based on anything logical, or anything that the neurotypical population remotely cares about.
b) Stability. I bet you'd never expect the time to come when a Microsoft OS could claim to be better than Linux in this department, did you? The time has come. PulseAudio (as but one example) is a disaster, and I also had other programs (such as Xine) crashing under Linux when they didn't under FreeBSD.
c) The need to endlessly screw around with things in order to get them to work. This isn't exactly the same as the stability argument above, but it's close. I realised a couple of days ago, that with Linux or FreeBSD, there's an instinctive expectation with me, for something to crash once or twice, and for me to have to tweak it somehow, before it will work without a problem. In Windows, that is never the case. Everything just works.
Those are the three areas where Linux needs fixing. The cult, the lack of stability, and the need for gratuitous over-configuration. Of the three, the cult is the only one which I fear actually isn't fixable at all.