South African Education Department Bans Free and Open Source Software

An anonymous reader writes "The South African Education Department has effectively banned the use of FOSS software in state-run schools by forcing all candidates writing the Computer Applications Technology examination to use Microsoft's Office 2010 or 2013 as the only supported options. In the same circular, the state has mandated that all schools use Delphi, instead of Java, as the programming language for the country's Information Technology practical paper. South Africa, notorious for its poor performance in Maths and Science and for having vastly over-crowded and underfunded schools, are now locked into costly Microsoft licensing because of this decision."

Comments

Re:(sniffs cautiously)

[QRDeNameland]

The whole "Never ascribe to malice" thing was written by a very malicious person.

It is attributed to Robert J. Hanlon, though the idea predates him by at least 200 years.

That said, most people seem to miss the important clarifications of this adage: 1) the key word is "adequately", otherwise stupidity becomes the perfect cover for malice; 2) the "Heinlein's razor" variant that says "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice,"; 3) the corollary known as Grey's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

Far too often, I hear read people talking about various gov't bureaucracy, bloat, and largesse and thus declare gov't as "incompetent". Far too seldom do they ask the question "incompetent for whom?"