On Sat, 2005-01-08 at 17:06, Chris Puttick wrote:
Point by point rebuttal for your school management...
(1) *Only* by using OpenOffice can you satisfy the file transfer requirement. Given the price of MS Office, it is inappropriate to assume that all households have access, particularly to the latest version. While de facto most do, it is common in less well off households for the copy of MS Office (and indeed Windows) to be illegal. By adopting an office suite that is free to use, and moreover uses a published file format, you ensure all students can have easy file transfer i.e. those who do not already have an (licenced) office suite that can read the OpenOffice file formats can be simply given a copy of OpenOffice.
Social inclusion. It is a government policy ;-)
(2) To assume a permanent commitment to SIMS as the school management system is, to say the least, unrealistic. Limited at best, it is written on a proprietary backend which locks the organisation into additional expenditure. To get a glimpse of one possible future, go see http://schooltool.org.
Risk of lock in is given as a specific consideration for procurement by the National Audit Office.
(3) Most schools demonstrate very limited skills in the use of ICT i.e. what they do know is immediately transferrable to OpenOffice/KDE with only minimal training (30 minutes plus a cheat sheet). Industry reviewers concluded only advanced users Of MS Office would be penalised as the more complex functions are harder to reproduce in OpenOffice etc.. Conversely advanced users adapted easier as they were often the people prepared to try things out! Tests on KDE (3.2 from memory) found with careful setup, many users failed to even notice they were not on Windows.
We should be education kids to be comfortable with technological change, not breeding a dependency culture that perpetuates the hang ups of the current adult population.
(4) As you say, Karoshi, or for those who need commercial involvement to be comfortable, Novell do a very nice line in config tools. Further, managing a modern, complex MS setup requires skills most schools choose not to pay for, and either struggle along with a system that is either full of holes, unchanged since a company installed it (and thus no longer meeting the real ICT needs of the school) or has a third party software package managing the configuration. Many schools still working with NT4 and 2k at the backend are going to be shocked to find running 2k3 needs support staff to be retrained.
I predict BECTA studies of TCO will reflect others that demonstrate savings of the order of 30% + in costs with FLOSS compared to proprietary software. I have done tenders that consistently demonstrate this *if* they are generic and allow bids from both Windows and Linux based solutions and stick to functionality rather than assuming specific bits of technology at the outset.
The current issue in schools is that they are protected from proper ICT audits. Were a non-education IT consulting firm charged with evaluating the average school's implementations, I assure you they would be less than complimentary ;-).
You really just need clued up education people to d these. Sadly the main auditors are accountants who know nothing about technology and OFSTED inspectors the great majority of whom are not technology specialists and know a limited amount of curriculum stuff and almost nothing about infrastructure and technology management. The only real rational for not going Linux entirely is that there are many desktop titles that curently only run on Windows. If the government think these are important they should be providing incentives to port the most important ones to stimulate competition in the market to get overall costs to the tax payer down. There is an election coming up. write to your Labour MP and say that if they don't do this you will vote for someone else. -- Ian Lynch <ian.lynch@zmsl.com> ZMS Ltd