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."

Comments

In Soviet Russia

[symbolset]

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.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Darkness404]

It depends though. If you look at a lot of (American) schools technology is crap. About 2 years ago I was in an elementary school computer lab with computers still running Windows 98(!) on hardware made for Windows 95. And legacy software wasn't the issue the school just didn't have the funds or the motivation to switch. After all a kid can learn just as well on a Pentium II that takes 4 minutes to respond to mouse input as a Core 2 duo that responds instantly right? Even the small expense of some noiseless thin clients and a powerful server might be too much because until the HDDs are dead, the memory is bad, the CD drives are stuck and the monitor has exploded, they have no desire to upgrade.

Retraining is also hard. Schools (at least in America) generally have a large amount of dead weight. Teachers long past their prime who teach boring classes who are apathetic towards students but who have been tenured and can't be fired without having to fight through the unions. These teachers have no desire to get a new keyboard, let alone an entirely new OS or new ways of doing things. In fact I'm sure a lot of them would rather have paper grades and typewriters. So when the price is $20,000 to switch to Linux $50,000 to upgrade Windows or just $0 to do absolutely nothing, many schools choose the free option especially in lower grades.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[hairyfeet]

Yeah a few years back I ended up giving a bunch of old office boxes to one of my local schools. I installed Win2K along with some basic office software OO.o and the like, and I bet they are still being used to this day. Why didn't i just use Linux? because unless I wanted to be their free admin for the rest of my days I had to install something their "IT" guy understood. This guy was such an old fossil he wanted to know where to input the DOS commands.

Most folks here talk about "Oh, Linux is free!" but sorry, that's bullshit. Yeah the OS may be free, but you ever priced a Linux Guru? Cheap they ain't because there simply aren't many of them. It is a LOT easier to teach a teacher how to go "clicky clicky, next next next" than to deal with a CLI. They know Windows, they use Windows at home, so they ain't scared of Windows.

After trying to give away nice older machines that I'd get given to me on jobs with Linux installed by me I quickly learned that old saying was true "Linux is free if your time is worthless" because i would get called back to service their 'free" machine when they couldn't get the printer to work, an update borked sound or video, etc. In the end it was just easier to wipe the machine, reinstall whatever Windows it had a license for, and then sell or give it away.

So while I appreciate the idea of a free OS for schools, unless they got the money to hire the Linux admins to run it I've found it just ain't worth it. Better to give them a locked down Windows box and just be done with it. Windows admins are cheap and MSFT is happy to give educational discounts to keep Windows in the schools, no different than Apple and my local college.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[symbolset]

Free software doesn't mean no costs. It just means cheaper, and usually only in long term. You have installation, training, support, cost of porting existing applications and data, etc.

TCO for Windows involves the risk of 17 years in a siberian prison.

TCO for Linux involves asking some people to work an hour late one day a week for a few months.

Plugging that into my ROI calculator gives a time to recover investment of... 1.2 milliseconds.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[symbolset]

Most folks here talk about "Oh, Linux is free!" but sorry, that's bullshit. Yeah the OS may be free, but you ever priced a Linux Guru?

I'm feeling my years. My grandmother has quite a few of them on me. It took me an hour to install her Linux over a year ago, and it still works fine. Nothing bad happened. I showed her how to install software and now she's got quite a lot of it. One of these days she's going to ask me to debug her wget scripts. Grandma never did learn to drive but she can MySpace like nobody's business.

Where I'm at Linux geeks are more common than the other kind so they're not expensive. Your mileage may vary.

Windows admins are cheap

Not always, but sometimes, you do get what you pay for. The problem with Windows admins is that you also need a LOT of them. Just techs to clean malware and fix twitchy software is >1% of headcount for some large organizations. IMHO most Windows admins see the internal workings of the machine as a "black box" and they are neither able to nor interested in understanding the lower level of activity that drives the magic blinky lights. Linux geeks are a different breed indeed.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[symbolset]

This is going to shock you but written English is quite common in Russia and most Russians are multilingual. Also, most Russians are quite adaptable and resourceful - by necessity as they've been more challenged than we have in the west. Some of these teachers built their own schools from raw logs, and they had to do manual labor to get the tools to work the logs. I'm not kidding. After that experience figuring out Linux should be a cinch. In short these are not typically your inner-city career button pushers. The ability of Russians to endure travails without complaint that would wreck our average American polar explorer is legendary - they're almost British in this way.

Localization is trivial. I believe Russian interface is supported in every Linux variant I've ever used. It's just Cryllic alphabet, keywords and fonts anyway. It's not like it's got some fancy top-to-bottom or right-to-left glyph sequence or anything. Lots of Russians use Linux by choice and I'm sure lots of them have figured this out. This isn't Windows: localization has been part of the standard GNU project template for many years.

If they're complaining that they can't do it then it's because they've been paid handsomely to make such a complaint. Otherwise they wouldn't be Russian. Now, who would pay them to do that? And why is anybody listening?

Re:In Soviet Russia

[symbolset]

OK, I've reviewed my posts from your reply to the top of the thread and nowhere did I say it was Microsoft's fault. It is an observed fact. It is, and to Russians to whom the blame belongs is irrelevant. They can choose to use free software or they can choose the risk. Microsoft has backed off some for now and so the risk is less, but eventually the risk will return because the software is not free and their Russian channel can never be reliably honest. In the Russian language corrupt government provisioning is so assumed that the reverse must be made explicit. I believe Chinese languages are similarly cynical. The safe choice is to be free forever. Free contains no risk.

If you want to fix the blame on Microsoft for not dropping the suit after finding out that the affected individual was in no way to blame for the piracy, that's on you. I didn't say that.

As to Microsoft's ROI, well, I don't know what to say here. Given the current state of free I can see how they must struggle to prove where they add value - especially when dealing with the malware ecosystem mounted against them which at some accounts is larger than the Windows market itself. I'm sure it's hard to deliver on this nine year old commitment when you can't even get your network software geeks to check their inputs on the most basic service they provide or even read the licenses of the software they publish.

You should probably check the corkboard on the way out of the blog center. I think there's a note there about me. Take your stuff with you when you go or you might not see it again.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Captian Spazzz]

Right Click the network manager icon in the top tool bar.
Select EDIT Connections
Select DSL (assuming that's the type of connection your using PPPOE for, but it should work regardless)
Click Add
Enter username and password and any other settings required.
Connect
???
Profit!

Seriously dude I just bridged my DSL Modem and connected using the native PPPOE client in Ubuntu. No command line needed.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[symbolset]

I've said this before in this thread so I'll cut you some slack and refer to my other posts. In Soviet Russia manpower is cheap. It's a very top-down management system. People are so resourceful that some of them don't just build their own schools from raw trees, they have to go out and earn the scratch to buy the tools to do so with manual labor or barter. This doesn't just apply to schools - in some ways their space program works the same way. It's terrible to think about what an engineer will do to actually get to perform some engineering. The whole ROI thing does not work in Russia. If people protest that they need Windows it's because they have been paid to do so or incentivised to do so by other people who have been paid to motivate them to protest, and even in that they accept some risk. In most cases these folks are glad to have books, heat, one computer per classroom and a classroom to teach in. This is nothing close to a free market economy. They achieve great things with these constraints because they are well motivated (inspired) and because they hope to bring about progress. On average, they're also bright because being stupid is in their system more fatal than it is in ours and in this case Darwin wins.

Urban Russia is not like this but Russia is vast and Urban Russia is but a small fraction of the schools and those few are even more politically (and unoficially) motivated.

Russians are very adaptable and resourceful in ways you cannot imagine. The difficulty in switching software systems is absolutely nothing to them. It's background noise. Compared to the difficulties of their normal lives outside of teaching it's not worth considering. Some teachers have not been paid their salaries for years and eke by on donations from the families of their students or in barter where they develop value above and beyond their official duties.

Russia is a very different place than you are used to. So no, overcoming the objections you mount are so trivial to them as to not be worth consideration.

OSS is great, but it is rarely free for non-personal use.

Ok now you're just plain lying. There are some OSS solutions that are not also free, but they're so rare and limited as to be unworthy of consideration. How desperate must you be to lie about the plainly obvious? In FOSS not only can the average user download an operating system and 50,000 useful applications for every endeavor, they can do with it what they will whether it's personal or government or corporate use, without the risk of years in a Siberian prison that Microsoft solutions provide. They can install it on a billion machines and the only restriction is that if they make changes and share them outside their organization they have to include the source code. If they build on BSD they don't even have that problem as they can even sell their innovations for a profit and not share the source code. This may sound harsh to you but as an alternative to using your spare time to turn trees into homes for favored Russians who have cash, it's a slam dunk. The fact that Linux runs well on the legacy hardware they're faced with is just a bonus.

It is very un-Russian to complain unless you are motivated to complain by some promised money. Where is this money coming from?

Re:In Soviet Russia

[shutdown -p now]

Russia is a very large country that has a far richer history than the US. A good Russian church has more years of history than our country has.

I am Russian, not American, and I grew up in what we call "province" (i.e. not in a big city). I speak from personal experience, so don't throw WP links at me, especially when they're so out of context. Sure, there is a bunch of local languages - they're about as relevant in Russia as Native Indian languages are in the U.S. Aside from that, everyone speaks Russian, and most people belonging to minority nations don't speak anything but Russian as well (with exception of Caucasus republics, Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan).

And schools? Yes, they do teach English there, in theory. In practice maybe 1 out of 5 people taught that way will know English well enough, say, a year after school, to actually read a random English text of moderate complexity. Spoken English is even worse, especially understanding it.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Spad]

If anything, Microsoft is moving *more* stuff to the CLI. Look at Exchange 2007; half the management tasks can *only* be carried out from the Powershell management interface and it looks like they're headed the same way with most of the new versions of their core apps (including Server core, obviously).

Not that it's a bad thing (I love Powershell, having been stuck with VBScript for automating Windows admin tasks for years).

Re:In Soviet Russia

[AliasMarlowe]

Let's see... what hasn't worked on Linux (and by working, I mean being able to use all of the core features): [list of stuff].

Either you're skilled at picking dodgy hardware, or unlucky, or perhaps you tackled things the wrong way.

Linux and free software are great, but if you're not willing to invest gobs of time to make it actually work, it's not worth it...

Curiously, it's never been an issue for me, and I don't restrict my hardware choices. I also don't regard myself as a Linux guru or expert.
Caldera OpenLinux worked fine on my Dell XPS T450 at home starting about 10 or 11 years ago, and supported all of its hardware, including thinwire ethernet LAN card, 33k modem internet, ATI Rage Pro graphics, HP Deskjet (maybe the HP 720) and HP scanner (I forget which model). This system was finally retired about 4 years ago, although its peripherals were donated to a local school before that.
About 4½ years ago, the beta of Ubuntu Breezy worked immediately and configured all of the hardware on my Sony laptop (which is now 6 years old and running Karmic flawlessly). The wireless LAN, wired LAN, bluetooth, 1920x1200 screen, wireless mouse, etc. were all configured automatically and worked correctly. The HP 4100c scanner and HP PhotoSmart 1218P printer both worked immediately over USB. The only thing I had to add manually was support for the stupid Sony media keys. Before Breezy, this laptop ran SuSE, which admittedly needed more manual setup.
More recently, 64bit Karmic is installed and working on our two no-name desktops, each with core 2 quad, 8 GB RAM, 2 TB disk, ATI4890 with dual screens, wireless keyboard+mouse, Logitech joystick, Wacom graphics tablet, and external speakers. Karmic 32 bit is also on our 5-year-old Dell GX260 with nVidia 9600GT (not used much nowadays, apart from web). The only manual configuration needed for the three desktops was selecting the binblob video driver via the Ubuntu GUI. All four systems had to be told about the network resources (HP7410 printer+scanner, Synology DS207 server, SMC2804 router/firewall) and each other's NFS exports, of course.

I use Windows systems at work; actually I have used Windows since v1, the MS-DOS Executive. In my experience, the investment of non-expert time to get a given functionality on comparable hardware was about the same on successive versions of Ubuntu and on contemporary versions of Windows (2000 or XP). Your experience seems to have been different.

Special pricing.

[palegray.net]

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.

Re:Special pricing.

[palegray.net]

Of course it does. The difference is primarily that you don't get yourself locked into a single platform for years to come that winds up costing a small fortune in licensing fees, and your overhead for managing the systems is lower over that period as well. I've worked on both sides of this equation for over a decade.

Free

[p0rnographer]

In Soviet Russia, free costs money!

Donations?

[Tablizer]

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?

Re:Low'ing price in face of competition not a "tri

[symbolset]

Let's remember the original cause of this Linux migration, shall we?

Re:Where can I send disks?

[mk_is_here]

You're trying to offer DDOS (Disk Delivery Overseas Service) to Russia?

i see a pattern...

[cies]

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.

Re:Special price

[Chuq]

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.

Free Windows SW is cheap marketing.

[FrankHS]

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.