On Monday 30 September 2002 19:09, John Ralph wrote:
As and active advocate of open source software in schools I have to question the reasoning behind the desire to run WINE at all, surely the ideal in an educational environment is to provide usable, cost effective and reliable software on the desktop.
er yes, but you have to provide what teachers want to use and some of them want things that are not covered by OSS. In principle, running on Wine on Linux is a step up from running on Windows OSSwise and without such stepping stones the ideal of all OSS is pretty much never going to happen.
WINE allows you to run Windows application under Linux/Unix, so what? You still have to pay for licensing for those applications, it's less reliable that running those applications on their native platform and have you tried to get Micro$oft to support there support their software when running it on another O/S, no I didn't think so :-)
So maybe its better to use say Windows 95 locally to run all those specialist things that only run on Windows - let's face it how much education software needs 2000/XP to run? - and run generl productivity software such as office etc as thin client using Linux. That way you use low cost MS stuff and don't have to buy any more but provide a possible way of getting from a to b. ie there are immediate savings but also long term savings without having to sacrifice any significant functionality.
Surely we should be putting our combined efforts into finding/supporting/developing applications which are good solid open source replacements for Microsoft Office et al.
Open Office does that, what is needed is the gaps filled not yet another WP. A simple data base like Pinpoint that originated on the old Acorn machines would be a good idea. I am at the moment trying to get specialist computing schools to put at least some effort into getting their best programmers to contribute to open source projects and a language specialist school to help with document translation. I have two very keen ones so far but this is going to take time. Imagine say 100 secondary schools contributing their 2 brightest A level computer programmers to OS projects. I believe it would make an impact especially if then replicated in other countries.
I agree with you that we should be assisting the developers and providing central support for open source products, but lets ensure that we choose the correct people to support.
Main snag I see is the fragmented nature of the OS world. Chris is in a CLC, John is in a CLC, East HUll CLC has a 120 station thin client Liux network, why not get a CLC group supporting OSS? CLCs are supposed to be innovating cutting edge technology for the benefit of the rest of the system. OSS certainly fits that model. Same is true of EAZ support, I have some of that too, then get specialist schools on board. Let's use the government initiatives. I'll help do some co-ordinating but there is just me and I have two companies to run! I can even get some sponsorship in kind eligible for matched funding in some cases and this has already funded some OSS. I am sure East Hull would host a meeting of CLCs interested in the concept. If I get two or three that are interested, I'll mailshot the rest and arrange it. Regards, -- IanL