Roadblocks to Linux in Education

An anonymous reader writes "The Open Source Industry Australia (OSIA) has lashed out at government schools and education departments for snubbing FOSS. In this column, OSIA says it has been trying for over two years to make headway with these government agencies but 'they tell me that they are scared of doing anything which will upset Microsoft.'" From the article: "If these departments suddenly stopped paying for proprietary software and switched to FOSS, the schools know they won't reap any of the purported savings. So, why would schools bother with trialling FOSS? Where's the incentive?"

Re:It's the apps, stupid!

[cyber_rigger]

Were's the vertical education apps, for all education levels?

You can start browsing here.

http://richtech.ca/seul/ [richtech.ca]

Personal experience concurs

[zaxios]

One school I worked at in NSW had a network of Windows 98 boxes drowning in malware, to the extent that they were almost totally unusable -- it took literally five minutes after logging in before any program could be launched; crashes were hideously regular; Internet Explorer had shady toolbars, popups in Google and refused to open a link in a new window. Disturbed that students actually had to try and work on these computers, I told the network administrator that he should install some antispyware software and Mozilla Firefox.

As if the sorry state of the network wasn't disgusting enough, the administrator replied that he'd received a Department of Education directive which said he couldn't install any programs for which there was a Microsoft equivalent. That meant no Firefox.

So, in my experience, the impression that the article gives of our school system not forcing Microsoft to actually compete for its business is pretty much spot-on.

The Problem is Insufficient Federalism

[Nova Express]

Take a look at this passage from the article:

Most government primary and secondary schools don't care about saving costs by using cheaper alternatives. You see, they effectively pay nothing for their proprietary software -- the schools' owners, the respective Departments of Education do. And the mandarins therein don't like anything that rocks the boat, and are thus greatly threatened by Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Nothing rocks an ICT boat like FOSS does.

The larger an organization, the slower it moves. The more insulated from the free market an organization, the more bureaucratic and hidebound it is.

A federal bureaucracy is, by defintion, among the slowest and most hide-bound of organizations. Remember, all bureaucracies run not on incentives (i.e., making a profit) but on constraints (i.e., following rules). These constraints lead to organizations that are manifestly inefficient compared with their private-sector counterparts. Absent signs from the marketplace that its methods aren't working, a government agency might persist in pursuing an unsuccessful strategy for years. As James Q. Wilson notes in his book Bureaucracy, "the Ford Motor Company should not have made the Edsel, but if the government had owned Ford it would still be making Edsels." Remember, America's federal government pursued a welfare program aimed at ending poverty a full decade after it was obvious that it was having exactly the opposite of the desired effect.

In America, this problem is somewhat ameliorated by the doctrine of Federalism, which incorporates the idea of subsidiarity, i.e. that government functions should devolve to the smallest unit of government which can carry them out. The federal government should not undertake something which can be handled by a state government. A state government should not undertake a function which can be handled by a county government, etc., all the way down to, in this case, a local school board. (Let us admit here that America's system of federalism has been steadily erroded for the last 70 years or so).

By centralizing their software buying decisions in their federal educational bureaucracy, Australia's education establishment persists in error when a smaller, more nimble organization would moved on to a more optimal solution, i.e. using software which isn't an expensive, kludgy, virus-and-security hole riddled piece of crap.

Re:Maybe school don't like...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you haven't been in education for a while. I'll just remind you that:
A) Having Linux requires maintenance consts.
B) Having Linux still may upset those in power or those that do not like "new things".
C) Having Linux on one partition still poses a threat to the entire system (computer, network, whatever). You must assume that the person that must maintain these systems must learn from scratch.

I'm a student now, and our school is just short of OWNED by MS. We are not even allowed to have Firefox installed. I've portested a bit, but was only able to get Putty into lab images (we're talking ~125 computers). I'm pushing for Firefox, 7-zip and Filezilla. We'll see...

To talk about "something open source" versus Linux outright seems a bit silly. You gotta start small. Those in power rarely like change.

Re:what are those idiots in the schools smoking?

[Master of Transhuman]

It's being tried - the German railroad system is converting over 50,000 workstations and servers to Linux. Not to mention thousands of other organizations.

Fuck off, Microsoft troll.

Re:Maybe school don't like...

[Dcnjoe60]

The error with your logic is that it's not just Linux applies in your ABC, but any operating system, including Windows.

As for the economics, conceding that both have maintenance costs, that rules out A. The fact that Microsoft will be releasing a new and different interface in the next version of Windows and Office, rule out B. Finally, Linux on a partition is no more a threat (and I'm sure many would argue it's less a threat) than having Windows on a partition, so that rules out C.

Here is some real economics for your situation. Your computer lab has 125 computers. The next OS upgrade from Microsoft will cost, say $100 to upgrade. That's $12,500. Upgrade to the next version of Office at the same time, to eliminate incompatabilities with the new OS, of course, say another $100 per machine, so another $12,500.

So far we are at $25,000. Now, this is assuming that you pay the same to install Windows as you would Linux, etc. So these costs don't really factor in, nor do maintenance costs, as both systems have these. The $25,000 is just the cost of new software.

Of course, we are assuming that your then three year old computers will have enough power to run all of this new software, chances are it won't or won't for long. So, you buy 125 brand new Dell computers for $500 each, or another $62,500. This time you will need to pay someone to install these and haul away the old, so figure another $100/machine for an additional $12,500. None of this would be required with Linux or one of the other FOSS operating systems and software.

To make a long story short, your computer lab, just to stay compatable with Microsoft will cost $100,000 more than switching to FOSS. Repeat this process every three years to maintain the upgrade cycle and you will see the true cost of your computer lab staying proprietary.

Same Thing In The US

[Master of Transhuman]

City College of San Francisco converted some years ago to the Banner college MIS system made by SCT (recently bought by SunGard). The system cost over a mill (IRRC); annual license fee in the neighborhood of $150K - which is supposedly for support as well, right?

Well, the school pays a consulting firm ANOTHER $115,000 - just now raised ANOTHER $80,000 to $195,000 - for ACTUAL support. And this just to "finish the upgrade to Banner 6" - and now they're talking Banner 7.

The consulting firm gets to recommend itself every year for a new contract...Nice racket.

If the school had any brains, they would hire somebody (like me) to bring the system in-house over a period of 2-5 years, and subsequently save themselves $250-300K a year (not to mention license fees for Oracle, HP/UX, HP servers, etc.) - not to mention getting a higher quality product.

And now, despite the presence of tons of successful OSS workflow packages, they want to go out and spend another God knows how much (figure I heard was $250K) on a commercial workflow package.

The library spent $100K on a new integrated library system (ILS) on the contractual condition that the vendor integrate it with the Banner system. Banner is complex enough that it is not likely the vendor will do this, resulting in a reneg on the contract, for which they will undoubtedly offer a small rebate as an incentive. Then they'll raise the maintenance fee (around 12% is standard for the ILS industry) to recoup. Standard software business tactics. The library will undoubtedly knuckle under.

All of this is invariably justified under the rubric "support", as in "Who will support the system?" Translation: Our ITS department doesn't know what it's doing, doesn't care to find out, and we are too timid to look at alternative support mechanism such as second-sourcing support or - heaven forbid - actually developing the stuff inhouse and KNOWING how it works so support is also inhouse.

It's bullshit. It's amateur night. I don't care how many corporate types weigh in with "Yeah, but they're right - support is all-important!"

It's not. And as SCT - and Microsoft - has proven, you don't get support from commercial software vendors. You get promises.

I read an article recently about a company that switched to OSS software and was very worried about support - until they found out the stuff "just works" - and they don't need support other than what can be provided by the OSS community which developed the software.

People in government organizations like schools don't care - because it isn't their money and it isn't their jobs because it's very hard to get fired from a City job after you've been around a while. So they always take the easy way out - and when it doesn't work, they either ignore it or they just spread the blame around and let it talk itself out - after first being talked to death BEFORE it was implemented (usually for years.)

Similar story in Canada

[thrashor]

Sadly, things are similar in Canada. While education funding agencies (the provincial education ministries in the Canadian system) are motivated by saving money, sadly, schools are often not. And this is despite tight budgets being the norm across the board. A fellow in the energy conservation services business and I (I am in IT consulting) were recently exchanging notes on our recent experiences working with schools. We had both independently come to the conclusion that schools are not motivated by economics, despite, paradoxically, being vocal about inadequate funding. It means very little to a school principal that you have a proposal (for energy savings or IT) that will save a large school board millions of dollars over two or three years, as it means little or no money for his or her school's budget. In Canada, there is currently a prevalence of "school based budgeting" where the bulk of funding received by a school board is distributed to the schools to do with as they see fit. This eliminates almost all opportunity for initiatives that realize efficiencies due to scale, such as significant FOSS deployments.

Re:what are those idiots in the schools smoking?

[G Money]

We're also using Zenworks Linux Management and while the current version is significantly lacking when compared to Zen for Windows, version 7 changes all of that. I'm currently on the beta and they've managed to bring almost all the same features to the Linux platform. It won't be out for a few months probably but when it does you should take a look at it. It is a revolutionary tool for Linux desktop (and server) management and doesn't really resemble the current version (which is essentially Red Carpet Enterprise) at all. It's the killer app that Linux on the (enterprise) desktop has been looking for.