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NZ School Goes Open Source Amid Microsoft Mandate
Dan Jones writes "Kiwis have built an entire school IT system out of open source software, in less than two months, despite a deal between the New Zealand government and Microsoft that effectively mandates the use of Microsoft products in the country's schools. Albany Senior High School in the northern suburbs of Auckland has been running an entirely open source infrastructure since it opened in 2009. It's using a range of applications like OpenOffice, Moodle for education content, Mahara for student portfolios, and Koha for the library catalogue. Ubuntu Linux is on the desktop and Mandriva provides the server. Interestingly, the school will move into new purpose-built premises this year, which include a dedicated server room design based on standard New Zealand school requirements, including four racks each capable of holding 48 servers for its main systems. The main infrastructure at Albany Senior High only requires four servers, suggesting an almost 50-fold saving on hardware requirements."
The contract stipulates that Microsoft gets paid regardless of whether schools actually use their software. So while the schools may not be forced through contract to use MS software, it doesn't matter to Microsoft as they still get paid for non-existent software.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Your argument is that because Linux is not like Windows, it will never supplant it. But, a copy of Windows will never be as good at being Windows-like than Windows itself, so attempting to mimic Windows is a losing strategy.
IMHO there are many ways in which Linux is better than Windows. I am able to work much faster under Linux than I can do under Windows and I find doing almost anything under Windows an exercise in frustration.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The idea behind Ubuntu (and desktop linux in general), is that it is a multi-user OS. Multi-user in the sense that the administrator determines what a user can do, and the user can do anything they want within these limits. There is no need for easily accessible multi-user desktop-shortcuts, because each user should be allowed to set up their own desktop the way they want it. You just have to shift the way you think about your desktop environment a little bit.
If they can't work out how to use MS Word in five minutes when they are used to openoffice then they really won't be trying.
Most of this stuff is so similar that it doesn't matter. When you get down to mail merges or other stuff just about every company does it differently on the same platform so they'll have to learn it anyway.
True, if they are setting up computer systems they'll be at a disadvantage - you have to know the Microsoft platform to understand that you choose "local printer" when you want to connect directly to a printer on the network (and a thousand other quirks).
By the way, I've heard EXACTLY this argument before about why schools should be full of Apple computers. It really has very little merit. If you are talking about a single semester technical college course it has merit, but for general situations it doesn't.
In a ten year time scale we went from MSDOS to XP in business desktop computing. There is no point at all in directly targeting a specific business desktop environment in the early and middle years of school and not much in the late years.
Yay! By that logic most people would fail in the real world of business.
You know when I went to school, we had a real world business system from Microsoft. We had Microsoft Works for Xenix and Microsoft Works for DOS. State of the art systems as Microsoft surely called them back then.
It's no use teaching children about feature 5432 of version 54.22.154.12.b of some software product as it will disappear or be made obsolete by some other function in the next version, often by the time the teacher actually gets ot teach what he has learnt.
What does matter is teaching what those programs are about. What is a word processor? What are the typical features of such a piece of software? It doesn't matter if you teach that with Microsoft Word 95 or Open Office, in fact Open Office has the advantage of being available to the children.
No matter what software product you will use as an example, by the time the children start working, it will be long obsolete.
Perpetuating the use of MS products is better for MS than switching to alternatives. Pirating a few copies of Windows/Office is a papercut to the beast. Your use of Linux (and related software) is the only hope of slaying the beast.
According to TFA, they saved money despite paying for the unused MS licenses.
"The brilliance of Microsoft's business model is they get the same amount of money regardless of who uses it," Osborne said. However, the school has saved significantly in other areas,
I also like the fact that the whole system was planned and implemented in less than two months. Sort of gives the lie to the whole "Linux is difficult" thing.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."