It is indeed a strange world when educators need to be convinced that sharing information, as opposed to concealing information, is a good thing. The advances in all of the arts and sciences, indeed the sum total of human knowledge, is the result of the open sharing of ideas, theories, studies and research. Yet throughout many school systems, the software in use on computers is closed and locked, making educators partners in the censorship of the foundational information of this new age. This software not only seeks to obscure how it works, but it also entraps the users' data within closed, proprietary formats which change on the whim of the vendor and which are protected by the bludgeon of the End User License Agreement. This entrapment of data is a strong, punitive incentive to purchase the latest version of the software, regardless of whether it suits the educational purposes better, thereby siphoning more of the school's limited resources away from the school's primary purpose. The use of such closed software in education may be justified only where no suitable open source solution exists.
Educators have been called upon throughout history to combat censorship imposed by various powers over the flow of information. The censorship being applied today comes in the form of licenses that lock away the tools to build the information age and laws that limit fair use in ways that are unprecedented in the modern era. The powers imposing this censorship attempt to create an artificial scarcity of information and the tools to work with that information to feed their greed. Where would education be today if, for example, the mechanism and idea of the Gutenberg press were not only hidden, but protected by threat of dire punishment under the law if anyone dared to attempt to "reverse engineer" it?
We are well into the beginnings of the Information Age. It stands to affect the people of the world at least as profoundly as the Industrial Age. It is time for the opening of the tools that will be needed to build this new age. Teaching our children to be passive purchasers of closed, proprietary solutions to problems is not enough. Constraining students to move the mouse within the confines of the instruction set of a few closed, proprietary programs merely cages those students and constrains our future.
Students should, at least, be given the opportunity to see how their new tools work. They should be given the opportunity to examine the inner workings of software. They should be given the opportunity to extend the functions of their tools, where they see or imagine possibilities. They should not be held back by locking the toolbox of the Information Age and told they must not peer inside, must not try to discover how it works, must not share their tools with others, must not use their tools without paying proper tribute to the software overlords, under penalty and punishment of law.
Conversations with high school students who complain of broken networks, unrepaired computers, too few computers, too few choices in programming languages, overworked and (so far as computers are concerned) undertrained teachers are the inspiration leading to this document. The main intent is to provide the following links so that those who wish to bring open source to their schools will have some 'ammunition' with which to persuade those in charge. Perhaps some money can be diverted from its current outflow to be used inside schools.
"Tux the penguin may become the preferred mascot of America's financially strained public education system - for Linux represents a way to avoid paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for software."
"Walk into the Largo, Florida, city hall and look at the two computer screens behind the reception desk. Instead of the typical Windows "Start" button in the lower left-hand corner, they have a KDE "Gear" logo, as do almost all of the 400-plus monitors on Largo employees' desks. Receptionists, administrative assistants, and division fire chiefs here all use Linux instead of Windows, and most of them don't really notice one way or the other. But the elected officials who are responsible for Largo's IT budget certainly know about and notice Linux, because using Linux instead of Windows is saving the city a lot of money."
"The day will come when political candidates will face budgetary questions about using Windows instead of Linux," Adelstein observed. "Largo provides the proof needed to create such a political agenda. When you project their open source solutions to other municipal, state, and Federal agencies throughout the United States, the potential savings run into hundreds of billions of dollars."
"Despite the prevailing wisdom that the Linux desktop is not ready for prime time, Largo has already happily migrated 800 city workers onto the KDE graphical desktop, deployed over an inexpensive thin client network running Red Hat 7.2.
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"Within budget" is perhaps an understatement. When Largo looked into the conventional solution employing Microsoft's Exchange server and Outlook clients, total hardware and software costs were "going to be somewhere between 400 and 500 thousand dollars." By comparison, Schomaker explained, "the total cost to implement the Bynari solution we calculated to be about 95 thousand dollars."
"Trinity College, at Melbourne University, threw open the doors to open source in December last year when it discarded its Windows NT network. Educators and technical staff wanted a better, cheaper way to teach the 750 overseas students in its Foundation Studies tertiary bridging course, which introduces Western concepts and computing skills."
"Linux is starting to find a place in many businesses who are tired of endless price hikes, upgrades, bug fixes and managing the many problems that Microsoft's software can bring.
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"The use of Linux is likely to spread because many universities use it to teach computer programming largely as the source code of it is readily available for them to play with. As those students get jobs, they will take that familiarity with them."
"So it's no surprise that the majority of the CTOs we surveyed cite cost as the primary reason they're turning to open-source software. Linux, BSD, Apache, and Perl are solidly entrenched solutions in their categories; purveyors of commercial wares -- or software services, you might say -- are forced to sell against them. With these technologies addressed by a plethora of well-written books and a common part of most university curricula, selling against the open-source leaders is an increasingly difficult task. IT workers are now tuned in to open source before they even hit the job market, a fact that our survey respondents find appealing."
"With the demand for enterprise systems managers rising more than 62 percent in the past year, Colorado State's students will learn skills that will give them a sizable advantage in their field while filling a valuable industry need," said John Plotnicki, chairman of the Department of Computer Information Systems at Colorado State.
http://edge-op.org/grouch/schools.html