A School District's Education in Free Software 288
david.jonathan.russe writes "The school district in Kamloops, BC, Canada has been working on a linux-based terminal infrastructure for several years. They now have a system in place district wide and they can not keep up with all of the requests for info. They have a great hybrid system, using diskless workstations all booting from local servers. 'The second-generation system cost the Kamloops district about $47,000 to implement, as well as the cost of training and the release time for personal study and taking exams. However, Ferrie has no doubt of the savings overall. License costs are disappearing as the district phases out its Novell NetWare licenses, and the district no longer needs to purchase productivity software. Ferrie also figures that the increased reliability represents a substantial savings, although he admits that it is hard to quantify. However, perhaps the greatest benefit of switching to free software is that the reliability of the new system frees up technical staff to do more than routine support.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge.
And all the cost savings are eaten up by (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, congrats to them. In areas where you have competent IT staff and are willing to do the work yourself, Linux offers great cost savings *and* the ability to have a system tailored exactly to your needs. Other places, it just offers the latter.
Schools can switch easily (Score:5, Insightful)
good, (Score:4, Insightful)
Good effort by them.
Re:US schools = owned by Apple and Microsoft???? (Score:3, Insightful)
Try to push for the library to have laptops instead that students can check out like they do books. Set them up on Linux -- if the student is just typing, they shouldn't need Internet outside of school. Set up an easy system to wipe/re-image the drives upon return. Everyone wins.
But... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But... (Score:4, Insightful)
Those who learn word in school today will probably be using something totally different by the time they enter the workplace anyway.
Atleast for them, whatever they end up using will almost certainly be an improvement, to someone taught on wordperfect word is a huge step down.
Re:Dickless again? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's fear. Ignorance and fear. And sloth (Score:3, Insightful)
What you probably have is a load of ignorant MCSEs. They have worked through the manuals, they have done the multiple choice tests, but they don't really have a clue outside the point and click. Why am I doing this? I don't know, you just have to. If you don't, security demons come and eat your soul. Or something. The fix for any problem? Upgrade. I guess we can't do that in XP, have to wait for Vista. No, I don't know how to do that in Word, I guess you can't, you have to wait for Office 2007. Meanwhile, I don't have to learn anything new, I can just go home at 5 and kick the kids.
This is the way of the world. As soon as you try to democratise a new technology, the skill levels of the early adopters are diluted because there just are not that many really able people about. And the dilution itself reduces expectations. If all the plumbers you meet are incompetent, you don't expect a competent plumber. And if you yourself know nothing about plumbing, you won't be surprised when the plumber takes five hours to swap out a central heating pump.
In my time I have come across "mechanical engineers" who didn't know you had to supply and remove the energy stored in rotating objects, "electrical engineers" who were capable of using the earth wire to short out a toroidal transformer and not understand why the wire melted, an "industrial chemist" who thought if you diluted an acid spill with plenty of water the sewage company wouldn't notice, an "environmental systems engineer" who thought that it was safe to fill a large plastic tank with a hydrogen/air mixture (he didn't know how the Van der Graaf generator works. It was a _big_ bang). These people were probably the average level of their occupations, and simply were not capable of independent thought. Your IT staff are at that level. As with this school district, you need someone with the support of the management and some real drive to push the thing through, and persuade these people that it's worth learning new skills because they create new opportunities. But they have to be pushed and jollied along, because otherwise they will lapse into sloth. And when they have the new skills - they will plateau again.
What does apply... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's true, it may be cheaper in the long run, if you're not a highly technical school -- meaning, you don't have to upgrade your hardware very often. But even then, many schools prefer to take the first hit free, and then be stuck with the recurring licencing fees.
Personally, though, schools are the first places I'd want to start on free software, as unlikely as it is. That way, when they graduate, they'll be ready to move their workplace over -- or at least be easily trainable for anything -- and if they go on to be programmers, they'll be more likely to fix the free tools than to buy the commercial ones.
Contrast that to the way it is now, where you only use the proprietary stuff because it's free in school and easy to pirate at home, so when you get to work, you insist that the company buy you the same tools, and the company figures it's cheaper than retraining you.
Re:But... (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you know what is the difference between Microsoft monoculture and open source monoculture?
I give you a hint. The other has huge license costs and you have to like what you get. And the other doesn't have license costs and if you don't like something, you can always either fix it yourself, ask anyone else to fix it or pay anyone to fix it for you. Please note the term "anyone". It is very importan word in this case. Imagine that you would live in New York. Let's say that you need to product every day. Let it be milk or bread or what ever. Now imagine these two alternatives:
a) There would be only one shop selling those products. No-one else could sell them.
b) __Anyone__ could sell those products and there would be a lot of shops selling them. You could even make those products by yourself.
Now, here we have two monocultures, a) and b), Do they still sound just as bad?
Free Software made them competent. (Score:2, Insightful)
In areas where you have competent IT staff and are willing to do the work yourself, Linux offers great cost savings *and* the ability to have a system tailored exactly to your needs.
This is something that will be repeated because free software is like that and the pioneering days are over.
The beauty of free software is where it can take otherwise mediocre staff. One of the greatest motivators is a chance to make a difference, as proved by GE lighting experiments back in the 1920s. In the non free world, you do your job in a very limited box only to watch your work torn out by the next version in the upgrade train. In the free software world, you have all the tools everyone else does and what you do can stand on it's merit. Eventually, the picture that emerges is that there was nothing wrong with your people other than poor tools.
The very worst case, once most of the work is already done, is that you just use the software like any other non free shop. This still represents an improvement, because free software gives you more for your money.
Re:But... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thin Clients at School (Score:5, Insightful)
Every second Tuesday of the month, walk by the IT office and remind them what day it is with a snide remark of your own.
Re:And all the cost savings are eaten up by (Score:1, Insightful)
"TANSTAAFL"
You have to pay them anyhow. So while it is not a free lunch, it is a cheaper one.
Children learning products instead of concepts? (Score:4, Insightful)
Here was the most tragic line in the piece for me
secondary schools in British Columbia are supposed to teach skills rather than specific software, in practice, many teachers had developed courses that specified particular pieces of software. "You get a teacher who's been around 20-30 years, and they're not that keen on developing their course again," Ferrie says in wry hindsight. Also, many schools had already paid for textbooks that referred to specific proprietary software.
The teacher is absolutely right in this assertion: students should be learning about concepts and ideas - not only about examples and instances. It's fine if an algebra student can derive the quadratic formula from rote memorization; but it is far more important that she develops the skills to think critically on how to attack this problem on her own.
In the best computer science programs and programming books; you walk away with a deeper understanding of the science behind the code. Learning should be focused on cultivating concepts and ideas that can be applied to a broad range of implementations; not churning out specifically Java or C# developers. Similarly, children should learn about core computer concepts and ideas - not on how to create flashing text in Microsoft Word.
Re:Congratulations to them, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, a monoculture is bad.. So how are you proposing that it changes? Teaching kids that the only way to use a computer is with Microsoft products just maintains the current state. Teaching them to use different systems can only be an advantage. If nothing else, it will give the kids a chance to see a different system in use. At worst, it will require them to do a little more study to get up to speed with Office.
Good managers enjoy reducing the workload. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, and after killing the Firefox CPU hogging process, the ENTIRE OS is unstable.
The founders of the K12Linux project were the kind of people who will always have work. They enjoyed reducing the workload as much as possible. A lot of the discussion of Windows comes from people who wouldn't have a job if Windows weren't so difficult to maintain.
Re:Schools can switch easily (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a mistake to let stupid bureaucracy get in the way of effective operation. You can get free entry level sysadmin services out of some of these kids for free, and even some less competent kids can be recruited as free first level tech support - turning that down is dumb. Sure, you can't do without techs or anything, but most support organizations have low level techs to solve simple problems and high level techs to escalate problems to.
In a school, either you're trying to educate kids efficiently or you're wasting time and money. Some kids want to be computer techs enough that they're significantly self-taught once they're juniors and seniors in high school. Allowing them to get experience by helping the school network helps everyone.
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Finally someone gets it in education... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Congratulations to them, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll agree that its easier to find a Windows admin... a competent Windows admin on the other hand is just as hard to find as a competent Linux admin. The vast majority of Windows admins I run into are complete idiots, not to say its set in stone.
As far as being cheaper, that is generally correct. However surveys repeatedly show that Linux admins can cover a much larger amount of systems than Windows admins, greatly reducing or eliminating the total cost difference between them.
Re:Congratulations to them, but... (Score:1, Insightful)
It's funny you say this. While I'm quite aware the average unix admin is more valuable than the average windows admin, and that average Unix (TM) admin wages are higher (which doesn't exactly mean he is more expensive) my own experience is that average Linux (TM) admins are worse payed than average windows admins and are just a bit above the level of windows drones. At least where I come from (Spain) a senior Windows sysadmin will be offered 10-20% *more* than a senior Linux sysadmin, even if it's expected for a senior Linux sysadmin to be capable on almost all fronts (e-mail, DNS, storage, backups, monitoring, filesystems...) while the windows sysadmin is consider "good" if its good on one front (an "Exchange admin", an "AD admin", an "SQL Server admin", etc.). Sad but true.
Re:Connect the dots (Score:3, Insightful)
Absolutely. Users already can install applications. There's no great mystery to it. They're also free to develop applications, if they care to. All the tools they might need are there, or can be downloaded off the net.
Of course, with Linux being a secure environment, your system administrators probably won't let you have root, and they may restrict what you can do in other ways, even to the extent of disallowing programs to execute from your home directory if it's felt, for example, that choice of software is not your responsibility. But it should be clear that's a matter of policy, not capability. Apart from security, one good reason the policy might be in place is to prevent people from diluting the economies of scale that your organization is trying to achieve through centrally managing software installation and upgrades.
It sounds like you're complaining that the policy is not to your liking. That's something you can discuss within your organization.
Re:And all the cost savings are eaten up by (Score:3, Insightful)
Removing viruses, removing malware, reinstalling Windows to remove registry cruft, removing pornadoes so that their teachers don't go to prison, etc. Switching to Linux can take less than no time (it's a manager thing, not a physics thing. if you didn't understand it instantly, don't bother trying).