NZ School Goes Open Source Amid Microsoft Mandate 305
Dan Jones writes "Kiwis have built an entire school IT system out of open source software, in less than two months, despite a deal between the New Zealand government and Microsoft that effectively mandates the use of Microsoft products in the country's schools. Albany Senior High School in the northern suburbs of Auckland has been running an entirely open source infrastructure since it opened in 2009. It's using a range of applications like OpenOffice, Moodle for education content, Mahara for student portfolios, and Koha for the library catalogue. Ubuntu Linux is on the desktop and Mandriva provides the server. Interestingly, the school will move into new purpose-built premises this year, which include a dedicated server room design based on standard New Zealand school requirements, including four racks each capable of holding 48 servers for its main systems. The main infrastructure at Albany Senior High only requires four servers, suggesting an almost 50-fold saving on hardware requirements."
Just as importantly, are they also... (Score:1, Insightful)
Inte£ free?
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The contract stipulates that Microsoft gets paid regardless of whether schools actually use their software. So while the schools may not be forced through contract to use MS software, it doesn't matter to Microsoft as they still get paid for non-existent software.
Re:50-fold savings? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the same government that made a deal with Microsoft to pay them regardless of whether Microsoft's software was actually installed. That doesn't sound like the kind of logical decision making that leads to entertaining the notion that 230 students might not need 192 servers after all.
You did it the hard way (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an easier way to create folder shortcuts on the desktop, which doesn't involve typing text paths: Right-click on the folder you want a shortcut to. Click "Make link". Drag the link to the desktop. Rename it if desired.
I'm not sure if the lack of "all users"-type functionality is a deficiency in Ubuntu, or an annoyance in Windows. For a single-user desktop, "All Users" is completely unnecessary, and on multi-user desktops I've more often seen it lead to annoyances than actually be useful. Google Chrome's Windows installer actually installs the program to the user desktop only by default, which will become more common as UAC-type enforcement on the Windows desktop becomes more common.
Of leaping we go... (Score:4, Insightful)
including four racks each capable of holding 48 servers for its main systems. The main infrastructure at Albany Senior High only requires four servers, suggesting an almost 50-fold saving on hardware requirements.
That is a frankly hilarious leap of inference. If you have a 4 door car, that means that you always travel with 5 adults, right? I mean, c'mon. It's statements like that that make OSS guys seem like wild-eyed loony tunes. Instead of making ridiculous, bold statements, why don't you, y'know, do some homework? How many servers do they really use, regardless of how many racks they have? It might be 4-8 big ones. That would be an interesting statement of fact, and would demonstrate the value of OSS. Instead, you just seem lazy and not able to objectively gather data.
Re:Not There Yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Your argument is that because Linux is not like Windows, it will never supplant it. But, a copy of Windows will never be as good at being Windows-like than Windows itself, so attempting to mimic Windows is a losing strategy.
IMHO there are many ways in which Linux is better than Windows. I am able to work much faster under Linux than I can do under Windows and I find doing almost anything under Windows an exercise in frustration.
You're doing it wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:50-fold savings? (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if they were bigger... there is little cost saving in building a server room for one rack vs a server room for four racks, even though you expect to use only one rack. However having to expand the server room later to accommodate a second rack now that's not just expensive but potentially disruptive to the school (construction is noisy and messy).
So it sounds like a sensible requirement to have a slightly over sized server room. And this being the government requirement possibly regardless of the school size. So there may be hardware savings, to call it 50-fold is baseless.
Having four servers for 230 students and maybe 30 staff or so sounds overkill to me even. But then again that's possibly designed with some redundancy in place, or with room for immediate expansion. Or are these application highly server based? Can also require more server power.
Re:50-fold savings? (Score:3, Insightful)
They don't need that many servers, they are saying there are 4 racks, each capable of holding 42sru. How many sru's does a ups take? 8? Switch? At least 1 each. How many 1sru patch pannels do they have? 10? San/nas? Voip phone system? Room for expansion? In a good network setup it's easy to use up 4 racks.
Does anyone on /. Work in networking any more?
Re:FTA (Score:3, Insightful)
It makes more sense to me to blanket license a country than negotiate licenses for individual schools. While some schools may not use MS software, the country probably still saves money in the long run compared to negotiating for each school.
Re:FTA (Score:4, Insightful)
It's called a 'loss leader'.... the kids produced by this system will not know that there are alternatives and be on the hook for full priced retail software for life... so yes, it's a very good deal... for MS.
One glass typewriter is like another (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of this stuff is so similar that it doesn't matter. When you get down to mail merges or other stuff just about every company does it differently on the same platform so they'll have to learn it anyway.
True, if they are setting up computer systems they'll be at a disadvantage - you have to know the Microsoft platform to understand that you choose "local printer" when you want to connect directly to a printer on the network (and a thousand other quirks).
By the way, I've heard EXACTLY this argument before about why schools should be full of Apple computers. It really has very little merit. If you are talking about a single semester technical college course it has merit, but for general situations it doesn't.
In a ten year time scale we went from MSDOS to XP in business desktop computing. There is no point at all in directly targeting a specific business desktop environment in the early and middle years of school and not much in the late years.
Re:congrats. (Score:3, Insightful)
If there is a case for some students learning specific MS programs, they can always run them on the student's own MS system or under the hypervisor. For many purposes, such as email and web-surfing, it makes little difference which specific program and OS the students use. Students who learn to use a spreadsheet or a word processor on Ubuntu will learn not only how to use those particular programs but the concepts behind them. Learning to use another program at work won't be that hard if they already know how to use the same kind of program.
Re:Drum roll please... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now get off my lawn, you grammar/math Nazis!
Re:50-fold savings? (Score:1, Insightful)
4 racks for a network serving 230 Students?? Sir, you ain't going nowhere near my network!!
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
For as many student that go through the school are students not bred into the Microsoft culture and not dependent on their software to be productive. This is not good news to them.
Re:congrats. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yay! By that logic most people would fail in the real world of business.
You know when I went to school, we had a real world business system from Microsoft. We had Microsoft Works for Xenix and Microsoft Works for DOS. State of the art systems as Microsoft surely called them back then.
It's no use teaching children about feature 5432 of version 54.22.154.12.b of some software product as it will disappear or be made obsolete by some other function in the next version, often by the time the teacher actually gets ot teach what he has learnt.
What does matter is teaching what those programs are about. What is a word processor? What are the typical features of such a piece of software? It doesn't matter if you teach that with Microsoft Word 95 or Open Office, in fact Open Office has the advantage of being available to the children.
No matter what software product you will use as an example, by the time the children start working, it will be long obsolete.
Naming (Score:3, Insightful)
Moodle, Mahara, Koha, Ubuntu, Mandriva
Is the weirdology in software naming caused by the lack of available domain names or something? Just asking...
Re:Not There Yet (Score:2, Insightful)
1. I didn't tell a houseguest that my desktops are Ubuntu now (used to be XP) and they managed to login/surf without any help
2. Computer drop in for older people using Ubuntu, I had to tell one user where to find the word processor and I now have a one page 'manual', everyone fairly happy
None of this is statistically significant, of course, but these users certainly aren't 'power' users. Actually there are two other points here:
3. You can arrange the desktop to look pretty much like XP, if you really really want (to quote the immortal Spice Girls)
4. Knowing a couple of desktops enables you to generalise, an important education theory win
Windows has some _really_ big no-nos (Score:5, Insightful)
There is one _big_ minefield with Windows, and that is software distribution. How on earth can a non-geek ever find out if a software package he downloads is legit or a piece of malware? This is probably the single biggest worry about amateurs using windows systems. (to some extend the problem is the same with the Mac)
Most Linux distributions solve that by having a package manager. I can safely tell a person to search for software in there and be assured that the chance they download malware is very slim.
As long as Microsoft refuses to address this problem and make all files downloaded instantly executable, I just cannot recommend Windows to the average user.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
which leaves those administrators who decided to use open source software vulnerable to claims of wasting valuable resources implementing other solutions when "Industry Standard" microsoft software has already been paid for
Re:Naming (Score:5, Insightful)
Moodle, Mahara, Koha, Ubuntu, Mandriva
Is the weirdology in software naming caused by the lack of available domain names or something? Just asking...
Trademark law.
Try finding a name that is available in 150 countries. The first one that you don't hate is the one to go with.
No lock-in... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a new school, one that was not previously locked in to any proprietary setup... They were able to start with a clean slate and do things properly.
Incidentally, how big or inefficient is the average school in new zealand if they require 48 servers? Just what exactly would all those servers do?
It *DOES* matter to them (Score:3, Insightful)
They get paid, that's right.
They are not being used!!! That's the first step for people to end using Microsoft products!
Have we not discussed that one of the main reason for the Microsft monopoly is that people don't know anything else?
Re:FTA (Score:2, Insightful)
It is inherently corrupt as it financially excludes the use of all other competing software, be it open source or proprietary. I assume the contract would also be for an extended number of years. The purpose of the contract is quite simply to burden every industry that wants to hire those students with the cost of retraining them to open source software and then the marketdroid schills claiming those cost as a disadvantage of using open source and all of it willing supported by the New Zealand government.
All this when there was a free choice that would not burden the citizens of New Zealand with additional foreign debt as well as loading New Zealand business with additional foreign debt to buy the locked in from childhood software so that they make immediate use of the students upon their leaving school. the contract is corrupt in every method of it's application and, it is impossible to believe the people responsible for making the purchases where blind to the long term costs to New Zealand for the choices they were making, unless of course the blindness was induced by things other than what was in the best interests of the New Zealand people.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
According to TFA, they saved money despite paying for the unused MS licenses.
"The brilliance of Microsoft's business model is they get the same amount of money regardless of who uses it," Osborne said. However, the school has saved significantly in other areas,
I also like the fact that the whole system was planned and implemented in less than two months. Sort of gives the lie to the whole "Linux is difficult" thing.
Re:One glass typewriter is like another (Score:1, Insightful)
The rather unusual gap between Windows XP and Windows Vista seems to have led people to believe that Windows doesn't change much. This is, of course, rubbish, as the huge fuss when Vista was released demonstrates. Vista is substantially different to XP, and 7 is quite different to Vista. For that matter, the difference between Office 2003 and 2007 is pretty big, even if most of the functionality still works the same.
If you are only being taught how to use one specific version of one specific piece of software, you're screwed either way. By the time you actually get a job, you're going to be using something completely different than what you used at school, even if it's just a later version of the same software. If you can't adapt, and can't work things out for yourself, then you haven't really learnt anything.
Re:50-fold savings? (Score:3, Insightful)
I can see a possible case where that might make sense.
If for example the cost of auditing what each machine was running was more than the discounted price offered by microsoft, ie just pay us a flat fee for every machine you have, dont worry about auditing it.
Having said that of course, I doubt that the deal microsoft worked out is anything like that fair.
However I would imagine part of the cost saving involved, is the schools are not being sued for unlicenced copies of windows, when they have 300 copies of office, but only 200 licences
Not that it makes it any less a protection racket from microsoft, but it might not be an entirely stupid move on behalf of the education department
Re:congrats. (Score:4, Insightful)
They would be better off *not* using ms products for the majority of their learning...
When I attended school, the school computers came with wordperfect and that's what we had to learn... Who uses wordperfect now? And this was wordperfect for dos we learnt, the current wordperfect versions as well as not being widely used, are completely different to the dos version anyway.
What schoolkids will find in schools today will not necessarily be what's widely used when they leave school.
So what you need to do, is teach the kids multiple programs, and teach them to think for themselves...
Don't teach them where to find a button to do X, teach them why they want to do X, and what such a function is likely to be called and have them work out for themselves how to do the same thing in multiple different programs. Teach them properly like this, and they will be prepared for whatever they encounter when they leave school and not tied to specific applications that have long since been forgotten.
The whole purpose of a school is to teach, if the result of the school's teaching means they get stumped when a button moves then the school has done a piss poor job... Buttons move around all the time, not just in computer programs... My TV has buttons on the side or the remote control for controlling it, my older TV had no remote control and had buttons on the front. In my car you need to twist one of the storks attached to the steering column to activate the headlamps, on the car i had before there was a knob you had to turn embedded into the dashboard.
Personally i'd be far more pissed if my kids were being taught in such a half assed manner that made them dependent on what's available today from a single supplier, which in no way prepares them for what might be available tomorrow.
I want my kids to learn how to think for themselves, not be indoctrinated by microsoft...
Re:Mandelbulb porn sighted! (Score:4, Insightful)
You write that as if it was normal, to assume that schools exist to teach children knowledge and make them intelligent.
School is a direct advancement from what Otto von Bismarck wanted:
Something like military service, but for children. To form them into what were the ideas back then:
To obey, to sit still and listen, to train things over and over again, to learn them by heart, etc.
Not to come up with free thoughts, ideas, and creativity. Because those would have created people who would want to lead themselves, not to blindly follow.
This was always the goal. And the idea that it could be something else, is a relatively new concept, that some dreamed about, but that still is very far from becoming real.
School is simply not what you should look at, if you want to educate your children to become creatives and leaders.
Even 4chan is better at free thought and creativity, than any school.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Either way,
Groupthink isn't confused; It's just that it's not synchronised properly.
Re:Mandelbulb porn sighted! (Score:3, Insightful)
This was always the goal. And the idea that it could be something else, is a relatively new concept, that some dreamed about, but that still is very far from becoming real.
The Athenians of old would like a word with you.
Re:congrats. (Score:3, Insightful)
> now your students will have no idea what to do when they go out into the real world of business where everything is microsoft.
>
> you MIGHT have saved a few bucks at the students expense. bravo.
This is of course nonsense.
If the student hasn't learned things in the abstract and is unable to move
from word processor to word processor or whatnot pretty much at will then
the relevant education has already failed him. This will manifest the next
time Microsoft decides to pull another Office 2007.
Kids today aren't quite as stupid as their predecessors. So the need to
fixate on a particular brand of application really isn't there so much.
Re:Mandelbulb porn sighted! (Score:3, Insightful)
Public school is a system intended to create soldiers and factory workers, and guess what? Most of the factories are gone. What's left?
Actually, if you look where the factories have gone, and look into the factories, you'll find something even more devastating for our school system: The factories don't contain many people any more. They're mostly full of robots. The few humans are there to tend to the robots, which means that they have a pretty good technical education.
The days of training kids to take robot-like factory jobs are over, and the schools that teach that way are now producing graduates trained for a lifetime of unemployment. But it'll take a few more generations of school kids moving on to unemployment before the message gets out to the schools' administrations.
There are still jobs available of the "You want fries with that?" variety, of course. The rest of the jobs, where there's a shortage of workers, mostly require that you be able to think to some degree, because the jobs aren't routine. We now know how to program computers to do most routine jobs. But our schools don't know how to train students for the current job market, because they're based on methods that actively discourage independent thought and problem solving.
Stay tuned, though. This can't last forever. Maybe you'll live long enough to see the schools redesigned to better satisfy your society's needs. Of course, it'll be vicarious, and won't do you much good ...
Re:Mandelbulb porn sighted! (Score:1, Insightful)
I think you missed the parents point entirely - he was pointing out that the Athenians of old were very pro-free-thinking and would not have considered Bismarck's ideas as conducive to real learning.
Same shit you said just more concise.
Re:You're doing it wrong. (Score:3, Insightful)
I was trying to make things easy for them to get started and ease into those kinds of things gradually. They are already upset enough about changes (going away from Windows); that would just compound things. I didn't plan to do it that way for mere amusement, I had a reason.
Why? Technology should enable what we wish to do, not what the machine maker wants. Unless you can prove it kills kittens or what-not, why not give the user of the software what they want?
Mod me to oblivion again for expressing my opinion, but you guys seem over-protective of an awkward baby instead of admitting it's awkward. If you want to "sell" Linux, you better find ways to relate to customers beyond patronization. I'm just the messenger.
Re:You're doing it wrong. (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps, but I'm also looking at this from the standpoint of an "average user". Fiddling at the command prompt for relatively common needs is "unacceptable" by today's standards.
Sure, we'd collectively like the demand if they had to rent nerds at $50/hr or whatnot to set stuff up for them in their homes, but that's not going happen. People would rather pay the MS tax instead and use what they know to do it themselves.
If Linux is not going to have the same look and feel as Windows, at least make it easy to find and do equivalent things from the GUI. Using similar terminology, such as "folders" instead of "directories", and "shortcuts" instead of "links", would also help. Windows lingo is the de-facto "language" of OS's, for good or bad.
Re:congrats. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's definitely true for younger students, but also consider that many students have to switch back and forth between a school PC and a home PC. If they are different OS's and their parents can't help them navigate the differences, they may be at a disadvantage.