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Valencia Linux School Distro Saves 36 Million Euro
jrepin (667425) writes "The government of the autonomous region of Valencia (Spain) earlier this month made available the next version of Lliurex, a customisation of the Edubuntu Linux distribution. The distro is used on over 110,000 PCs in schools in the Valencia region, saving some 36 million euro over the past nine years, the government says." I'd lke to see more efforts like this in the U.S.; if mega school districts are paying for computers, I'd rather they at least support open source development as a consequence.
The region of Valencia has the highest debt of all Spain and has been part of many corruption scandals usually involving stupid expenses, like an airport nobody uses and has cost the citizens millions. Now they claim they are saving money. Yeah, right, only after firing the whole public TV sector in order to save millions. TV sector which coincidentally started to reveal the corruption *after* they were fired, but not while they were being pampered by bribes...
At the risk of being modded troll I'll ask if anyone knows the TCO on these Linux roll outs. If Spain has lower tech wages it might be much lower than Windows, but in the United States at least there's tonnes of cheap Windows IT gurus but if you want someone that can admin your Linux boxes you'll pay through the nose. Google Docs and other web apps might be changing that though, at least until you hit college.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Will they invest any of the 36 million Euro savings in Linux development or are they just free loaders?
Don't worry, they'll be investing in Swiss Francs.
How do the Windows IT gurus become Windows IT gurus? By using windows. What do they use Windows for? Gaming. Would they use Linux? It can be far more better fine-tuned. So why do they not use it? No Games for Linux. Why that? No or crappy graphics drivers for linux. Therefore: TCO of linux for spain schools is higher than windows TCO because NVIDIA doesn't release drivers for linux that deserve that name.
DirectX is not a library -- its a vital part of Microsoft strategy.
First of all: Valencia is the most indebted region of Spain in relation to it's GDP (and second in monetary value) . Having spent billions on ill-fated projects (F1 track, Americas Cup, Arts and Science City) that have failed to meet economic returns. The former President resigned over corruption charges, Majors being investigated for contract mishandling and enrichment, a former governor in jailed this same week, etc... No thing that comes from this region is out of suspect.
This said, What it is commonly spoken about these projects is that they do not exist to leverage libre/opensource software on the school. They exist to praise regionalism of the different autonomies(regions) of Spain by local politicians, so, instead of viable ecosystems, they become second-choice-dual-boot-distros that exist to fill the pockets of several local companies (distro makers, maintainers, call-centers, certifiers...) that do literaly nothing contributing to the communities they get their software from.
Also, every region spent millions on creating their own distro, duplicating efforts (which is a clear indicator that it is a national-regionalist issue rather than a techno-economical one). If Extremadura has it distro, Andalusia also wants it and Valencia too.
Moreover, I put in doubt the claim that a somewhat high amount of Euros were saved whatsoever because educational licensing is usually done on a gubernamental level and not on a seat level.
So, this is only one more sample of PR-BS for me.
------- The last Sig. got fired.
question is how many do you need and how much can be done remotely. i know 4 internal IT guys are maintaining linux counters for gas stations spread across whole country here since one of those 4 is my friend. before moving on linux, IT dept was 20 people + outsourcing.
The very first line of the summary says they're making available their own custom distro. So they're obviously not free loaders. FFS, I know that most people don't RTFA, but at least RTFS before bitching.
Open source has been the next thing for a couple of decades now. Hardware with proprietary or modified open source has been the primary meme since then even when commercial sucks hard like PowerPC open, Android, and the recent Amazon Fire and many, many others including OLPC.
At what point will SOME open source effort include at least properly debugged hardware even if they have to repurpose maximal cost Macs using the command line?
JUST JERRY
European governments can easily claim theyve saved money by switching to open source software, whereas its almost impossible for the american governments education system to do so. Why? because europeans consider employees a resource whereas american government considers its employees an expenditure or overhead.
extra IT and teacher training are considered an expense in america, whereas outsourcing to Azure cloud services means only having to pay the license. We factor pensions and holiday pay into the cost of an educational employee, and morosely enough consider excess vacation time a financial liability. that license fee represents avoiding the cost of all this, so while it might add up in the long term to larger costs, it wont cost nearly as much as 14 new IT staff and 11 new teachers..
Good people go to bed earlier.
I, for one, don't care if they give back or not if they don't do anything that the licence requires to be given back. It's about the userbase. MS have the userbase and the paying customers are their reason for being. On the other hand, our reason for being is not the same. We'll work on this stuff either way, but if we can get less of "come fix my computer" crap then we're even happier.
Linux is FREE for anyone to use.
No such thing as a freeloader, or are you now saying large organisations must be forced to pay ?
Will they invest any of the 36 million Euro savings in Linux development or are they just free loaders?
That's an odd perspective ... you can't have it both ways. If you want the freedom of the GPL, then you get ... the freedom of the GPL.
American school districts don't need to save no stinkin' euros!
Microsoft is pricing themselves right out of the market more & more
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Big shot companies bribe the stupid officials who lack the knowledge and have no backgorund in scinece etc., in their schooling (they may claim that they had passed high schcool with these subjects) and the board members and the district admins, do not answer to tax payers who pay the taxes to support them. Most tax payers are also stupid and wearing various political and religious misguided thinking without rationalization, do not queation these officials. Take for example, the community colleges. They could use retired and well known people to do the admin. for the fraction of the huge salaries paid to the paper pushers. The present highly paid amins do not answer to any one . With about 600,000 technical high paying jobs need trained and certified workers, these community colleges do not have all the campus teaching those skills because they skim the money for their own salaries and bonuses. . They deny vetrans an opportunity to audit courses before taking them for credit so that they can ease into college level learning. but the CCs deny them that opportunity which is a crime. But the boards selected unqualifeid chancelleors and many VPs which in fact are not required to run the CCs. In turn the board members and their firends and relatives get all the contracts supplying over priced services. Instead of one president, 2 vps and one chancellor, look at the number of paper pushers in all these CCs.. So, utilmately, the industries control the schools and CCs and people do not fight against them. The great grand children in the future will pay for these selfish acts. Most of these guys' ancestors came to US for a better life, yet they are systematically destroying it. Roman emphire is reappeariing.
I think you're pronouncing that wrong...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSC11hLbM1w
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I'm positive YOU are pronouncing that wrong...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSC11hLbM1w
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I was once given the task to connect PERL DBI to a MS SQL Server. I searched for it and found that "SQL Server" is a Sybase dialect, and FreeTDS can read it's native format. I had the perl program in no time.
There are almost always effective libraries to read data from Microsoft products from Linux. Real SQL databases are large and hard to move, but most MS files can just be moved onto a Linux disk and used.
The Total Cost of being Owned by proprietary formats is quite high.
They are teaching schoolchildren to be potential Linux developers. So, yes.
Wow, so you're dismissing this initiative based on your own imagined version of events? Apparently fact checking is no longer necessary whenever there are initiatives to save public tax money, good job.
What it is commonly spoken about these projects is that they do not exist to leverage libre/opensource software on the school. They exist to praise regionalism of the different autonomies(regions) of Spain by local politicians
I wonder how much influence the absence of Valencian Catalan support in Windows but availability of support for at least large parts of Linux systems influenced the adoption of this system (Windows can apparently be made to display some of its UI in Catalan, but the translation is incomplete, and the local Valencian dialect of the language is entirely unsupported).
You have a sickness, which I am guessing you are in vehement denial of.
It is still a sickness.
You should try to get help.
Hello, I'm a sysadmin who actually is doing a transition to Linux at school (in Russia). Speaking only about technical side of the story, Linux requires an great amount of effords to run it smoothly. First, you have to be a more or less pro to setup Puppet and SSO in Linux and it would be pain because of Gnome (etc) bugs. In contrast of painless AD setup. Second, the hardware which kept Windows XP successfully for a decade would have issues with Linux ACPI, modeset etc. p.s. No Unity experiments are welcomed, so bye-bye Ubuntu.
And I would also say, that this is just for 250$/month for parttime job.
> This is a mistaken belief. Windows is actually pretty easy to
> mass-admin remotely, even with built-in windows services
Just ask anyone running their own botnet!
There is a perception among open source advocates that if open source software saves you money, you now owe some of that money to them. If you don't pay, you get called a freeloader. This agrees with the "from each according to his abilities" part of Marx's famous saying.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Huh? I've heard of commercial companies getting criticised for not giving back code changes even though they're making money from OSS, but I think you're very mistaken.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
or 48 million dolla.
quote well it was Loui Leblanc a french utopic socialist and not Karl Marx the father of social sciences ,a and also founder of the political movement called communism but hey read the communist manifesto, most of the 10 vindications are already implemented at USA and even more at OCDE countries
There are/have been several Debian developers in their payroll: Jordi Mallach, Miquel Gea and others.
As the developper of the educational software GCompris ( http://gcompris.net/ ), I am glad to see how far they went in their project. Just looked at their documentation and it is really impressive. It is really motivating for free software developpers to see our work is useful.
1 - Schools in the USA do not hire competent IT or Teachers that can handle a powerful Operating system like Linux. Actually paying for competent staff is outside of their budget.
2 - Microsoft will quickly give the schools all the free licenses they want for the OS, Office, etc.. if they even threaten to switch to anything else.
Microsoft knows that if you dont get the children hooked when they are young, they might use their curiosity and explore other operating systems. And we cant have that.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I love no one states this Lliurex distro's popularity among students in this region. As a Spanish student living in Valencia I could tell no one likes it very much. Sure it's cheaper than Windows licenses to the state, but it's not a good distro after all. Even unmodded Edubuntu works better.
Actually, 2023 will actually be the year of Linux on the desktop. Unfortunately, it will also be the year of the alien invasion.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
You replace the entire computer. Big enterprises have a 3 year life cycle for a desktop machine, and there's generally no reason to do a OS changeout during that 3 year time frame. After 3 years, the machines are "book value worthless" having been depreciated, and are sold or disposed of as surplus.
Where I work, with an extremely heterogeneous environment, there are people running NT4.0, XP, etc., and very few "upgrade" in situ on the same hardware. They buy a new computer, move the files and apps over, and pray for the best. $1500 for a new computer is a day and a half's labor (with all the burdens, vacation, benefits, etc.)
So this is a straw man argument.
...that US Public Schools not "support open source" in this way. Why? Because in a majority of the workplaces, you won't be using Linux, OpenOffice, etc. Why? because most businesses don't bother that that stuff and the extra learning curve required.
I haven't heard of that perception. It's much more like people can try for fre and if they like and using what you've made it gives them an incentive to invest to get whatever you downloaded better or more new work from you in the future. Nr 1 priority is to get fans. That can be by open sourcing or piracy or whatever. You must get people to like what you do and Want to give you money so you can make more for them.
what does saving tax money have to do with contributing back to open software
Making it available doesn't mean they're giving back any of those 36M though. It's pretty cheap to make it available once comparted to creating it.
The real question is: how mucho of those 36M will be reinvested into FLOSS development.
I honestly don't think they have any duty to give back any more than they're doing now. Do you donate 100$ everytime you install linux on a computer? Cause that's what it would have cost you otherwise. I know for sure that almost no one does. It's nice if they decide to give back but they have no responsability to do so. The whole concept of "freeloaders" is laughable to be honest. I thought one of the primary visions behind FLOSS was that information should be free? I guess if you view open source as merely a means to an end, you might think such a thing as a freeloader could exist, but I completely disagree with that vision.
I honestly don't think they have any duty to give back any more than they're doing now.
Nor do I. They have no obligations. Nobody implied that. We just said not doing so made them freeloaders.
Do you donate 100$ everytime you install linux on a computer? Cause that's what it would have cost you otherwise.
I do not. I do collaborate by open sourcing most of me development, and contribute into various proyecto thourgh various means. Also, I'm not saving $100 by using linux in my computer because I have not migrated from something propietary.
I know for sure that almost no one does.
Relevancy?
It's nice if they decide to give back but they have no responsability to do so. The whole concept of "freeloaders" is laughable to be honest. I thought one of the primary visions behind FLOSS was that information should be free? I guess if you view open source as merely a means to an end, you might think such a thing as a freeloader could exist, but I completely disagree with that vision.
No, they have no responsability to give anything back. Nor I, nor GP stated that this was the case.
Can you please describe why the concept is laughable?
Do I really have to explain to you that the word freeloader is pejorative? Also, don't do that "quote piece by piece" thing. It prevents you from seeing the big picture and basically pigeonholes you into nitpicking. Every question you asked is answered in the comment I already made, if you take it as a whole. There's a reason this is frowned upon in forums.
No, you don't need to explain why it's pejorative; what I asked is for you to explain why it's laughable, something competely different.
I quote by-piece, because you make different statements, and I reply to each one individually. Replying inline has been proper etiquette for several decades now.
Finally, no, none of my statements were replied above. But since this is your second reply attempting to divert attention from the subject at hand, I'm guessing your merely using a Red Hering to disguise your lack of proper argument.
It seem false. I am valencian teacher and I can to say that in all schools it is using much more Windows than Lliurex. The teachers do not known to use computers and they only known to use Windows and doing click here and there like monkeys.
Sorry because muy english is very bar.