"Frank Shute"
wrote: By rolling over you are not `evaluating emerging technologies', you are not in a position to sensibly `advise[s] the educational IT industry' and you are not encouraging `a strong, competitive market of choices available to educational users'.
As a taxpayer, I want my money back.
Who's in charge at Becta? I want to write to them and flame them to a crisp.
Absolutely. I too was very disappointed to read the original comment from Malcolm. I think Becta needs to think long and hard about who it works for. The biggest constraint in my own school is money - lack of it is causing the students' education to suffer. I want to expand our network; the hardware is not the problem, it is all the software licenses the money-grabbing software houses want us to pay for. One software title can cost a school many hundreds of pounds. We just can't afford it.
Also Microsoft appears to have some kind of mystique amongst senior managment, LEA, etc. We have spent well over a month getting quotes for hardware, comparing them, etc. Yet when it comes to software everything (including the financial regulations) gets pushed to one side. Trying to even get the head of ICT (let alone other staff members) to even look at a machine running KDE is a major task. Yet the several thousand pounds cost of MS office and publisher on a room of machines is a serious constraint. (If it were anything else we'd probably need to get special permission from the LEA to spend this kind of money, in this way.)
I would have hoped Becta would have been more positive about the open source movement. I am also surprised that RM et al haven't cottened on the fact that there is money to be made with open source software. If they could do with Linux what they have done with NT/Windows and their Connect networking they would be on to a winner. 'Free software-pay for
They would actually have to do less work... But they might not be able to sell it for as much. Also are RM big enough to have one of the (illegal) supply agreements with MS which means they get their MS stuff cheap if they supply it with every machine they ship? -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763