Could or Should schools use more open source software?

[dave-lew99]

I see your point, we're also talking deploying linux to the desktop - a school will have relatively few servers - even if they were all linux it'd still be quite a light workload. Part of the problem is that in-between size of organisation - too small to justify a large management infrastructure but big enough to need one. Now, that's an argument for nationally or regionally centralising school IT infrastructure, in which case you could make significant savings by employing fewer, more qualified people along with a infrastructure management implementations - similar to the way you do i imagine.

If schools were able to cut down on the amount of duplicate work between schools and their staff, an open source solution becomes more practical - for example a LEA distribution of linux, pre-configured with software, centralised authentication etc etc.

It's just that a comparable deployment to AD under a linux envrionment is going to take longer to implement and as you say require more experienced staff.

The key is to target your software purchasing appropriately - don't buy a licence of photoshop for every machine in the school. Buy a licence for every machine in the Art/Design teaching areas and deploy the open source alternative site-wide - this is what they did at my university.

We had MATLAB and so on in our labs, the design people had Photoshop, the media people had stuff like Avid Pro editing suite, but everywhere on site there was the GIMP, Firefox, etc.

 

[steve-h]

as much as I hate to say it - gimp can't compete with photoshop

 

[bigredshark]

It's very true, a typical school site with (I imagine) 10 servers and maybe a few hundred desktops struggles to justify proper management infrastructure and the benefits of scale are certainly massive for us. I imagine petty local politics will prevent them doing anything useful but otherwise an LEA maintaining the infrastructure and a template for sites could work positively (that's true of windows too of course).

Mainly I just wanted to correct the view that it's not possible to build a properly managed, controlled infrastructure based on unix systems.

 

[dave-lew99]

Mainly I just wanted to correct the view that it's not possible to build a properly managed, controlled infrastructure based on unix systems.

That's fair enough, i wasn't saying it wasn't possible - even in our small company of 7 people we have centralised authentication and whatnot. Just that at the smaller scale it's costly compared to the alternative (ie MS).

And yes there are lots of petty politics between schools and LEAs - i know of a Primary school headteacher who had all the responsibility of a full school wide refurb but none of the authority and had to go all the way up the LEA chain just to get a lighting system where you could override the automatic light-sensing system (turns lights up as it gets darker).

You'd think someone would have specified that as teachers like to use projectors - but no and she couldn't just liase with the contractors to sort it out!.

 

[Minto]

By the way - I'm a teacher in a large secondary school and I stand by my comments. There is no reason why a small number of licenses for things like photoshop couldn't be used for specialist classes, and run remotely on a linux client logged into a windows server offering the applications.

I can categorically tell you that the windows and AD schemes in schools are amateur at best. The security is in most cases fragile, and the stability is questionable. Problems routinely materialise without apparent cause, and disappear days later for no reason. Wireless connections drop periodically and refuse to re-authenticate. Programs and plugins appear and vanish. Documents are regularly lost due to poor procedure or faulty backup. Databases and administrative software continually crash or mysteriously lose attendance data. Nothing is professional or well designed, and technicians are up to their ears in petty problems every minute of the day.

There is nothing about the system in place that I could not personally reproduce or improve upon in a linux environment of small to moderate size, and I have no official training or qualifications in the area. I am sure that a suitably qualified/experienced professional could, and in fact has designed a free system of considerably better quality.