Schools In Portugal Moving To OSS

New submitter thyristor pt writes "In light of massive national budget cuts, the Portuguese government will force public schools to move to free/open source software (Google translation of original in Portuguese). Schools with some 50,000 outdated computers won't see their software licenses renewed, the main reason being the cost of hardware upgrade inherent to mostly Microsoft software updates. Will the Euro debt crisis be a driving force to the spread of open source software?"

Comments

Waiting for MS to underbid

[Mathinker]

We've seen this over and over again. Microsoft will just offer to give the software for free. They know that it's not in their best interest for it to become general knowledge how functional open-source alternative have become.

Re:Waiting for MS to underbid

[Zemran]

It is not about the functionality. Most people use MS because it is all they know. They do not know and are not familiar with the alternatives. My mother went to university and studied art after she retired, and if you visit any of her uni friends, young and old, they now use Macs because they got used to them. If all the schools in one country switch to Linux, in few years all the universities will be full of people that are used to Linux and then, soon all the companies will be full of people that prefer Linux. It will be the OS that they are familiar with.

Too many people get into the My Computer is Better Than Your Computer without realising that MS are playing a different game. They do not even try to be the best, they just make sure that they are what most people are familiar with. To do that they will happily offer free software and free 100% support to all education establishments if that is what is required to keep the status quo and the schools and universities know this. Portugal will be using 100% free MS next term.

Re:Waiting for MS to underbid

[Dot.Com.CEO]

It's not the case with Portugal. Teaching software has to support (and in fact does support) Linux and Windows.

Re:Waiting for MS to underbid

[igreaterthanu]

When's the last time you saw a version of Windows require a less powerful computer than the previous release?

You mean like Windows 7 and soon to arrive, Windows 8?

Re:Waiting for MS to underbid

[unixisc]

The embedded version of Windows 7 may have a small footprint, but would MS want to take the time and trouble ensuring that it runs on old hardware, some of whose manufacturers may no longer be around? It'd be one thing if they were supporting the same things that Windows 7 supports, just dropping memory requirements here & there, but if they're asked to support old hardware that was supported by, say Windows ME, they might understandably balk, since it's not trivial for them to re-obtain things that they had years ago, and one can't assume that they never dispose of their older computers. Also, why would they do it, since simply waiting it out might see the same people coming back to them?

On the question of whether Linux is the answer to all these, it depends on the people who are doing this. If it is some clueless idealists being indoctrinated by FSF Europe, what you anticipate is correct. But if they've thought this out and are planning this - hiring people who know FOSS and can work closely with those who write the specialized software that these programs need, they could have better luck. For instance, they could start with edubuntu, and then see how easily or difficultly they can get their educational software onto FOSS platforms. Some of the special stuff, like the content driven stuff, is the main things they have to work on. As for the others, people are not going to get Office 2007 or Quickbooks, but that's where they'd need to start migrating to some of the alternatives. Of course, the people who write Libre/Open/K/-Office have to ensure that their suites are functionally on par w/ MS-Office, so that nobody can complain that critical things that they need to do and used to do on MS can't be done on the others. Oh, and there is no way this is going to happen quickly. Chances are that the computers they have are running fine w/ Windows for now, but they use the time b/w now and whenever they need to change to do a feasability study of what can be done in FOSS. Chances are that if their speciality software - by which I mean the stuff actually being used for education - is successfully moved, things like the Office Suite may not be the ones to hold them up. But like you said, it will take a lot of training, and will be similar to when a company undergoes a major software introduction - only much larger. Essentially, they'd have to bet that the cost of conversion would actually be less than the cost of upgrading all those 50,000 old boxes.

Re:Waiting for MS to underbid

[tqk]

The other problem is bad attitude, which in a way reminds me of the way online shooters have become. go to ANY forum and ask for a non CLI way to solve a simple problem and what do you get? Most likely a wave of pure hatred, with every filthy name in the book, ending with "RTFM or go back to Winblowz noob LOL!".

What a crock of !@#$. Have you even looked at the Ubuntu forums? BS like that is not allowed at all! That crap doesn't even fly in debian-user, and anything and anyone can post to it without even subscribing. Usenet and IRC used to be like that, but that stuff hasn't flown for years (which is a shame because I enjoyed stamping on those jerks' heads and teaching them civility).

What's wrong with CLI ways to solve problems? You can't type? Could'a fooled me. Why are you looking for non-CLI progs in the first place when simpler, quicker solutions already exist? Just because you're used to Windows Explorer doesn't mean GUI file managers are the right way to do things. They even decided to hide filename extensions from you, despite the dangerous security implications (in Windows) that raises.

Stop spreading FUD. It makes you look like a fool. And buy yourself a cheap sandbox machine so you can try out modern installs without fscking up your working machine. Go to Distrowatch and find some ISOs to burn. Run the install over and over again and learn their potential. Pretty soon, you'll be able to build a fully functional box in half an hour.

Re:Not likely

[Anonymous Coward]

I think a properly done open source installation can be better than the Microsoft alternative. At our university (Helsinki University of Technology) there are large Linux-only computer classes, and those computers just work. In Linux you will not have viruses, which is a big plus in the school environment use case. Also, managing those computers should be easy, although so is a properly done Windows installation.

A Linux installation can also be made more lightweight than the Windows installation. Especially when taking in account the mandatory anti-virus software for Windows.

The traditional problems Linux has in business environment are less severe in school environment: The Office compatibility issue is not there, and hopefully there aren't that many legacy applications to support. The students will learn Linux just as easily as they do learn Windows. If they have to use both Linux and Windows, it is just a good thing. Too many users know how to use Windows, not how to use a computer.

Portugal has one big advantage in this move: they might get the educational software for free from Brazil. Same language, and Brazil is a heavy user of OSS. Brazil did a move of 350000 school computers to Linux in 2009. I don't know what the current status of the program is, but I suspect there is a lot to reuse from that move.

Now, take in account that this installation is likely a lot cheaper than the equivalent Windows installation, and you have something that should be better for their school system. Of course, I can't say if it is objectively better from their position...

Re:Not likely

[ozmanjusri]

Open Source can only spread by being objectively better (in ways customers care about).

Have you tried Libre Office lately?

Most people I've set it up for like it a lot better than the current ribbon-infested Microsoft version.

Re:Think Ninite...

[Hymer]

"The real question is, can Windows 7 run properly?"
Nope, it keeps asking me for admin password all the time. ...and on Windows servers it became next to impossible to use a browser.

Re:FAGE - the linux legacy

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I strongly suspect(as a linux user who has done some school dept. IT work, largely Windows with a sprinkle of Mac) that "they", the students, will neither lose nor gain all that much.

Some of the admin layers will have it tough(so they probably just won't switch those people), because that is where the spreadsheet-jockies, the users of obscure proprietary student information systems, etc, etc. congregate. The techies will be split: the microsoft crew will resent losing relevant skill, the FOSS-enthusiasts-just-working-a-job will be gung-ho.

As for the students, though, I doubt they'll see much change. Unless the computers are the explicit focus or means of pedagogy(as in something like the OLPC experiment), which is rare and nontrivial to do. Think what you will of their results, they built a previously unavailable sort of hardware along with a new security model and a variety of other tweaks to get that going. In the majority of cases, 'educational' computers are just tools. The teachers want them to be working, reliable, and running the browser/word processor/whatever required to get the classwork done. Admin wants them to be not disruptive, to be a not excessively good porn source, and IT delivers as it can. Because most of 'educational' IT is so peripheral to learning(yes, there are plenty of arguments for why office is better than LibreOffice. None of them have any bearing on whether you'll be able to learn to write a decent essay by writing a bunch of crap essays and revising. VI might be pushing it a little; but notepad should be enough), it is good that they are going with the cheaper option, to free up money that can be better used; but I'd expect virtually no change in how pupils are expected to interact with technology.

Hey, you are using OSS! You can make changes however you want! No, actually, your user account on our system is locked down to keep you out of trouble, just like it was on Windows. The school wants you to be able to log in, get your files, and use programs X, Y, and, Z. We've delivered.

Outside of strictly vocational schools(later in the student's progress, so they will still be fresh when they hit the workforce), where learning specific tools might be what the doctor ordered, or outside of ground-up computers-in-education-rethinks, which make student exploration of the computer a focus, not a problem, educational use of computers is really incredibly generic. Web, email, word processing, copy-pasting.

A minority of specialist users will simply be un-switchable, certain specialized software isn't multi-platform, has no real competitors, and is too costly to try to duplicate. It just isn't worth it. The vast bulk, though, really get a very constrained view of computers at school. It barely matters what they run.

Re:Administrative support? Culture change? Ploy?

[icebraining]

I went to a (public) High School here in Portugal around eight years ago; at the time, all the machines we used in IT classes already dual-booted between Windows and a Portuguese GNU/Linux distro ("Caixa MÃgica") and we had to learn how to get around on the Gnome desktop.

Re:Not likely

[Super_Z]

But in all my life I have never heard of a business choosing F/OSS software purely on the basis of price. There's always a degree of pragmatism involved - "cheap and adequate" is usually how it pans out. As soon as you have to interact with someone else who's using MS Office, there's a good chance it ceases to be adequate.

There are lots of world class open source projects out there that gets picked because they are simply better than their closed source equivalents - linux, apache, postgresql, spamassassin, varnish, ruby, python, gcc/llvm, webkit, postfix, dovecot etc.

I have used Word for years, but after having been forced to write a 50 page user manual in it, I stopped using it. I have never looked back.