I am a teenage at high school and like most high schools they run Microsoft Windows. There are some computers at the school which really do NEED to run Windows. However, most don’t. The ones that do need to run Photoshop and Flash. Those are in the computer lab. However, there are the ones in the library. These are ancient, and I mean ancient, beige boxes. They run XP, but they can barely handle it.
I’ve talked with my Computer Science/Engineering teacher and he wants to set up a Linux lab but the technical administration won’t let him because they don’t want to learn about Linux.
Now, I live in a mid-sized school board. I also happen to work at the company which prepares the computers the board uses. They would save hundreds of thousands of dollars – if not millions – if they re-equiped the computers with Linux. The students would have more resources and faster computers. Administrators wouldn’t have to deal as much with some very clever “hackers” (not malicious, but could definitely cause headaches) at our school.
These administrators must not be dumb people. They’ve set up a system that – most of the time – works. They’re switching over to ActiveDirectory (from Novell Netware, which was ancient) and AD by all accounts works just fine in Linux. They aren’t even managing a Linux server. This is a school. A public school. The administration has the dual responsibilities of making sure that the money of taxpayers is being well spent and that students get what’s best. In this case, it is not Windows.
What I would like, dear community, is a link to a set of letters or something that can be given to administrators of a school or business or other such institution that has anything against Open Source Software. If they don’t exist, shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t we, as a community, formulate a clear, articulate response to further our cause?
Food for thought. If these letters or models for these letters exist please comment!
