Here, here about school/educational software on opensource. I've just been told that my proposed terminal server setup won't get the go ahead unless I can prove the educational, not financial, viability! On Wednesday 11 July 2001 09:55, Alan Harris wrote:
Yes we, in schools, could save money but teachers won't go for open source without training. believe me, they'll say that the pupils can't cope but the problem is not with the pupils.
if we want this to work, and we want schools to go opensource, then we, the open source community, are going to have to provide training materials, faq's and example lessons which lead to defined National Curriculum Levels. When we can do this THEN we can provide a total solution to the Microshaft problem....
Ian Lynch wrote:
My experience is that the Microsoft licensing for operating systems in particular is a complete minefield. Even the distributors don't seem to understand the codes etc. If dealers and distributors find this complex I should think the majority of end-users have many unintentional infringements of the licensing rules. Its fairly straightforward with a lot of the curriculum applications that simply say you have a site licence for this programme at £x. Its the operating systems that cause the problems. The real snags are all the different prices of OEM, multiple license packs, the range of operating systems and a range of rules for upgrades, for servers concurrent users, client access licences, multiple server licences etc etc. In fact I should also think that quite a lot of people end up paying more than they need for a whole host of reasons. From a reseller point of view, the sooner we have one open source operating system to deal with the better. Microsoft's reply will be that schools should go for schools' agreement which costs something like £40 per machine per year but a) some eligible machines won't run the latest software so schools end up paying for upgrades they will never do and agreement doesn't cover the basic operating system because M$ assume every machine bought has one of their operating systems on it so the SA only covers upgrades. Mind, I can't see that M$ would be stupid enough to take all schools to task. The backlash in terms of bad publicity would be the fastest accelerator to Open Source I can imagine. Most schools don't deliberately pirate software and most seem to be becoming increasingly fed up with the cost of Microsoft. Take a largish secondary school with 400 machines. They probably pay around £60 per OEM Windows on buying each machine - more like £100 if its Windows2000 and let's say they have School's agreement at £40 per machine. That's £24,000 and then £16,000 per year just for what they can have free using Linux and StarOffice and a few odds and ends. If they want thin clients using Citrix its another £80-£130 per machine. If Government targets for pupil computer ratios are to be met, this has to be replicated all over the country. 4000 secondary schools and that's £50-60m on M$ agreement alone. Double it for primary and its of the order of £100m a year in schools alone and that ignores any thin client costs. This doesn't take into account the savings that would also be made by using thin clients and the reduction in maintenance and technician support required so I would say we could at least double the savings on that basis alone. Tell your local MP that you have a way of saving £100-200m of taxpayers money per year in schools alone and I should think at least £1 billion nationally in the public sector if the Government will make a bit of effort to promote Open Source. Most of this money will be re-used and a lot of it will go on better support and training locally thus boosting the small business sector, improving the technological literacy of the nation and strengthening the economy as a whole rather than increasing our imports bill from the USA. Write to your MP now and copy it to Estelle Morris at the Department for Education and Skills!
-- IanL
----- Original Message ----- From: Frank Shute <shute@esperance.demon.co.uk> To: Schools List <suse-linux-uk-schools@suse.com> Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2001 8:50 PM Subject: [suse-linux-uk-schools] software in schools/piracy
There's quite an interesting article at Salon about how US schools are being hunted down and fined for using pirated commercial software & how they are reacting:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/07/10/microsoft_school/index.htm l
Are UK schools going to be next in the line of fire? I've heard that controlling licences and the paperwork involved is a major time consumer and administrative nightmare for schools. Anybody got any personal experience?
The real shocker was getting fined $50000 for 100 odd illegal copies of MSDOS. I'm sure there are plenty of schools in this country who have many illegal copies of DOS running under Windows without realising it.
Anybody been investigated/fined yet?
--
Frank
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