Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Ministry of Education from Brazil is buying 90, 000 Debian GNU Linux computers

[Ben Hague]

RM can do cross-platform, as the software for the QCA KS3 ICT tests does
run on Linux as well (based on Tomcat and PostgreSQL). The software's
crap, but cross-platform crap.

For me as the admin for a RM school the single biggest problem is SIMS,
the school management software. From what I can tell this is the best of
a bad bunch, and barely even manages to be single-platform. The big
problem with any open-source replacement is that the government requires
massive amounts of data to be recorded, and occasionally returned to
them. To determine what this is someone has to wade through stacks of
legal documents and convert it into something meaningful, and that isn't
something many people would do without getting large amounts of money in
return. There is SchoolTool, but that still has some way to go.

The other problems aren't insignificant. The main one being that due to
the ubiquity of MS Office all the textbooks assume its use, and quite a
bit of bought in content won't work with anything else. There are also
other specialist apps that don't yet have an open source equivalent such
as Sibelius, or Multimedia Science School and which the school has sunk
a lot of money into.

After that you've got training issues. Maybe I'm just unlucky, but
there's a lot of staff who are not comfortable with computers and deeply
resent having to use them in the first place. They didn't want to build
up the limited levels of expertise they have, and their response to
being asked to ditch it and start from scratch again would be
unprintable.

Having said that I think it will happen eventually. We already have some
Linux servers doing various email and filtering related things and I'm
pushing out cross-platform apps like Firefox, Audacity, The Gimp and
Inkscape where possible. Also as the younger teachers come through the
attitudes to IT do change. I reckon that in 10-20 years time we will see
major differences, but it's much harder to have rapid change when
there's already so much infrastructure in place. If you're essentially
starting from scratch like in Brazil the switch to open source is much
easier.

Ben

On Tue, 2007-12-18 at 19:00 +0000, Andy O'Brien wrote:
> I really think that RM Will try and drag out MS based products for as
> long as then can. All their products are based around MS Systems and
> they really do not develop with cross platform support! 
> 
> 
> I am guessing for this reason that their development costs for multi
> platform will be massive.