On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 01:17:01PM +0100, ian wrote:
I run a small business based on open source so I tend to be a bit less willing to say so be it when the government funds my (Often foreign) competitors to the tune of £100m using my taxes!
Government, both central and local appears to be quite happy to throw money at various proprietary software companies. At the same time activly ignoring open source alternatives.
At the moment I don't see much scope for ELCs to help free software. If there is an opportunity, believe me I'd be the first to exploit it. The fact is that quite the reverse is true. Rumour has it that ELCs will be opened up to buy *any* software. This simply means to the school MS Office etc is free so there is not much incentive to try anything
It is already confusing teachers to think that proprietary software is "free software".
different. Ok, we could register OO.o discs at say £500 each for ELCs but who would bother when they can just download and cut a disc? If they allowed support to be included it might be a different ball game. If not the £100m that could have been spent on some Linux development or OO.o content is entirely tied to licensed non-free software.
The daftest so far is Accelerated Learning, who's "Champs" product consists of the Windows version Apache hidden inside a zip file. But they "don't support" using any other software for the content also stuck in the zip file. When all of the web servers they run, including the Internet version of the same product are running on Linux...
Not so much a point of complaint as the fact that people need to realise that ELCs are a political sop to licensed software vendors who lobbied massively because of the BBC initiative to spend £160m on on-line resources. The government is taking school money and only giving it back to them conditional on them spending it on something the government has decided in its vast wisdom about ICT that schools need, and then only
Effectivly "E-Learning Credits" equate to "Ring Fenced Corporate Welfare for Proprietary Software Companies". So maybe they should be called "RFCWPSCs"
from a certain category of supplier. So much for free markets and local management.
"E-Government" and PFIs are two ways in which local management of schools has been weakened. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763