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How insulting this article is to the folks that work in IT at our public schools.

In industry, you have to convince the boss, and change will happen if the boss buys in. In Public Schools you have to convince several hundred union teachers, the school administration, the school board, and local voters - any one of which can halt this effort dead in it's tracks. Heaven help you if parents think you are pushing an inferior soultion on their children to simply save money.

I find it insulting that the author of this article felt he added something to the debate by doing a couple google searches and listing a few open source applications and others that will run on linux. Do these programs meet reporting needs the districts have under No Child Left Behind, among other various Federal, State, and local laws? Is there any software that supports the textbooks in use, or are there even any textbooks that incorporate Open Source applications in them?

Finally, the myth of free hardware needs to be put to rest - you can't run a school district on "free" computers (Computers cast off by business users as too old). Our local district has about 1,700 computers - assuming we could get "free" first generation P4 systems, how many of them will last long enough at the hands of 4,000 users 5 days a week, 35 weeks a year? Will we be replacing them every 12-18 months? Will they all be the same, or will we need to create a wide number of images and store a wide variety of spares to keep those systems running?

Our local district has 7 full-time IT employees, if we have to start repairing older machines, we'll likely have to add a couple full-time employees, commit a large space for a workroom and parts warehouse, and hope teachers/students don't mind when random machines fail in the middle of class. The five year-old machine in your kids room is treated far better than any public-use desktop - the usage patterns don't compare.

But we'll save money, because the machines are free!

Please spare me simple-minded articles like this.

If you really think you can save money, go to your local school board, ask for their most recent budget, and apply real logic to your analysis. My district pays $64K/year to MS, if we dropped MS Windows and adopted Linux in the classroom, we'd have to add at least one additional headcount and would only save a fraction of that $64K. Completely eliminate MS software in both the backoffice and classrooms, and you'll save the entire $64K/year, but you'll now have to hire programmers (one or two I imagine) to customize, tweak, and support all those "free" programs you downloaded off the Internet...

Running supported hardware with MS-Windows actually costs less than than Linux on older hardware when you ramp it up to these levels (1,700 computers, 4,000 users) and have to address all the reporting requirements our schools are subject to.

Believe it or not - do the math.

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Anon, your missing the point. Free Software IS the best thing any public institution can use for an enormous number of reasons. If you understand the social basis of Free Software, the technical superiority of the distributed development model that having open application source code allows, and the fact that the cost for development and customization from the default package can be spread out among districts, then most of your argument and that of most people that fight against using Open Source in schools falls completely apart.

All the current requirements or tracking, and reporting could be added and the sync to current textbooks _should_ be handled the same way it is handled for the closed source software that is currently being used. As for how well the computers will do under constant load, I have not seen a more capable system then Linux at remaining stable. It does not have the same kinds of issues under dynamic load that windows does, that is not a fanboi cut on Microsoft, it is simply a fact. Stick to a boring desktop/window manager with no 3d eye-candy and your rock solid. So whatever hardware you put it on, old P4, or whatever have you. A standard issue of Ubuntu for example runs great on as low as 800mhz, it will run fairly well all the way down to 500mhz but there is a noticeable performance loss...although for K-6 students this would likely not be an issue. Plus there are tons of educational applications already available to help teach everything from typing to astronomy to math and lots more, they would only need to be reviewed and certified for use in our school systems. Hell, at the state or federal level a team could be put together for the single purpose of educational software development.

How about adding to that 64K you pay(we the public pays) Microsoft each year, the cost of all the licenses for the apps the schools use for teaching and management along with the secondary and tertiary software packages needed to keep the whole ball of wax running and you wind up with a lot more money then you think. I won't go into the free computers issue as that is a social as well as fiscal one and my progressive stance on the absolute importance of education is far from mainstream, except to say money to schools for books, materials, AND teachers should never be shorted for any reason whatsoever.

It's not that the article was simple minded, I think a great deal of this kind of background was simply believed to be a given. Far too many people(including you) still think the main difference between Free/Open Source Software is the price, but that is just the surface. The main differences is how well it works, and what you can do with it because you have the right to change it in any way whatsoever.

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