On Mon, 2006-04-17 at 17:25 +0100, Thomas Adam wrote:
At least, if that was the reason, they can be re-trained :-/
Not likely. Have you any idea of the immense scale and cost, not to mention time that would take? You're talking about *academics*. These people have enough to do without retraining. Heck, if you read the news, you'll know most of them have been on daily strikes recently over their pay with respect to their workload. Adding (what I know is conceived as 'unfavourable') additional things like this is only going to buck the whole point and trend of it.
When/if in three to five years' time they move to MS Vista/ Office .NET, then staff will need re-training anyway. That would be a good time to decide to move to OOo on BSD or GNU and give the same amount of training :-)
They are on the backend of things. They also run Squid on RH servers (I should know, I helped them with a few things in the past concerning it). But that's all very well (and probably expected), but it's not pushing out to where the real people would benefit from it: the students.
Indeed. But this is slowly changing at many institutions.
There is one room in the entire University which has about eight machines with dual-boot functionality to RH Linux. But these are reserved for post-graduate studies where Masters' students learn LaTeX via it in (shudder) EMACS. That's a positive thing, but limited.
At many universities LaTeX on *nix is the standard desktop for maths undergraduates (eg Keele). The situation seems to vary widely between research universities (admittedly former Polytechnics tend not to use LaTeX - but more than half of FE colleges use Moodle: FOSS is used everyhere in some form).
And as Ian Lynch says elsewhere in this thread, change is a slow process, but it is happening. :-)
Yes, I am aware of that. I am not as naive to assume it isn't, but when you see just how much resistance there is behind the scenes to even *small* things like this, it does get a little disheartening.
I can imagine :-/
What needs to be done is for some unity amongst schools to happen. I know this is being done slowly, and for that I am greatful. It's all very well potentially looking at Linux's use in higher education (University level), but if Linux is to have any impact at all on people, I would surmise it needs to be one at the Primary and Secondary stages of education. (And to this end I know things are happening to try and get that to be the case).
Indeed - although BECTa have yet to reply to m questions, and BECTa's website is lamentable when it comes to mentioning FOSS solutions, it seems that BECTa are actually quite taken with FOSS - I hope we see some practical fall-out from this interest soon, but I won't hold my breath, just in case ;-)
Well, do keep us posted as to this.
I'm sure we'll be hearing more on this list :)
Thank you for all of your input, Thomas. Nice to see the traffic on this list, too :)
You're welcome, and I agree. Of all the mailing-lists I am on (and have been on) this is one of them where I genuinely feel as though I make a difference.
It's the only *nix edu list to have stayed the course in this country :) We were lucky Roger and SuSE were so open-minded about this list not being distro-specific :-) - Richard -- Richard Smedley, RichardS@bvsc.org Free Software Evangelist, Midland Open Source Technology. http://www.most.org.uk/ ``Software Freedom for the Voluntary Sector''