Battle For Open Standards In Dutch Public Education

In his first accepted submission, pjstevns writes "The heat is on! With the rising use of online systems for school administration the battle for open and accessible solutions is here, now. Parents are forced to buy 'proper' operating systems from your favorite Redmond based supplier — just to be able to access their children's grades, or participate in classes. A petition addressed at parliament for proper implementation of the open-standards guidelines put forward by the Dutch government itself is buzzing around the Netherlands. Comply or Explain!" It seems like a major supplier of education software in the Netherlands has written essential software in Silverlight that all students must use, claiming "...Magister is truly multiplatform because Silverlight is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux," despite it more or less being non-functional with Moonlight.

Comments

On the little freedoms

[OrangeSun]

I find it wonderful that people are striving for what must seem like 'little' freedoms. I've recently come around to the idea that these small cracks become the gaping, festering ulcers of our society when left unchecked. OS

Re:Shoot the Schoolmaster CIO

[KoolyM]

It's more subtle than that. The Dutch schoolmaster CIO only has two pieces of software to choose from, one of which is a bunch of outdated Windows desktop apps that are terrible to work with and the one TFA is about, which is a fairly decent set of web apps that unfortunately have never worked on anything but windows (first they used all sorts of ActiveX components, now it's a bunch of Silverlight crap, apparently). So there really is very little the schoolmaster CIO can do, and given the lack of options, he probably made the best possible choice.

Re:This is not how you change things

[inglorion_on_the_net]

Slashdot is fun. It reports news which basically doesn't exist. This is just some guy who is on an anti-Microsoft bender and wants to somehow make his ideology meaningful in a world which doesn't really give a shit (if the low Linux uptake has anything to go by).

This is not about Linux. It's about whether or not it is okay for public education institutions (and public institutions in general) to force the public to use a specific commercial product if they wish to partake. Given that there are various alternatives to said commercial product, and given that the government has adopted a policy of using open standards where they exist, I think forcing people to use a proprietary system is not okay. The fact that this system is also more expensive than many of the alternatives makes it even more odious.

His rant is way too emotional for something that the politicians and most parents won't even understand.

The story here is really simple: will we force everybody to pay for the most expensive option, or will we use standards, so that people can choose what they use?

If people refuse to understand that, that's still no reason to take the worse option.

I mean, everyone uses Windows right?

Even if that were the case, it would be irrelevant: if standards were used, then _any_ operating system would be able to participate, including Windows. It's not as if, by going with open standards, you would lock out the users who can now use the system. And that's the whole point: to not lock people out.

But they also made the decision to make life more difficult for themselves by going against the grain and choosing to use something other than Windows (an OS pre-installed on virtually all computers you can buy, so having to buy it yourself is unnecessary).

Now you're blaming the victims. It is not them who are making things more difficult, it is the people who implement systems that will only work with specific other products, rather than going with standards that can be supported anywhere.

One could argue that some fights are worth fighting for, but if so... a small petition from a bunch of geeks with too much emotion and too little tact is likely to not do a damn thing.

You may well be right there, especially considering that the government _officially_ has a policy to use open standards and even to prefer open source software - yet, in many cases, has gone for a proprietary solution without even looking into the alternatives.

On the other hand, it was also a small bunch of geeks who discovered that the voting computers we used to use in the Netherlands weren't reliable, and they were tenacious enough to eventually get them all banned - even though the initial reaction was denial, marginalization, and misinformation. It is a good example of exactly what you're up against if you want to replace a vested commercial interest with the right thing, but it also shows that you _can_ win. But you have to raise awareness, first, and that is what those guys are doing.