Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Re: Fsuk-manchester Digest, Vol 12, Issue 12

[Paul Waring]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 11:04:07PM +0100, Paul Robinson wrote:
> Are you talking to me? How the blazes would *I* know? I'm too busy  
> writing a EULA for my Facebook app that says your children belong to  
> me if I think they could work well in a cotton field...

I think Matt was actually referring to me, as I'm at the University of
Manchester in the Computer Science department - though only until
October.

In terms of the University, I'm not aware of any departments which run a
free operating system, other than Computer Science (most labs dual-boot
with Windows/Fedora, one lab is Fedora only, most desktops given to PhD
students dual-boot by default). All the public clusters run Windows XP,
and there is a plan (not sure how advanced) to upgrade to Vista, so I
doubt a free operating system rollout is just around the corner.

However, a lot of the servers run FreeBSD, and Exim handles mail for
most of the University, so it's not entirely non-free software.

> That might change soon - there is still a plan, I believe, for more  
> WiFi and getting people out of labs and onto their own laptops. At  
> that point, everything is up for grabs and arranging something for  
> Fresher's Week with Compsoc (if they still exist) might be a plan,  
> especially if it involves giving discs away for free.

CompSoc still sort of exists, not sure how as almost everyone who was on
the committee graduated when I did. As for Wifi, it's been slowly rolled
out over campus (by slowly I mean five years from nothing to reasonable
coverage) but I don't think there's going to be a big move to everyone
using laptops any time soon. Apart from anything else the security
implications would provide no end of headache for IT Services if they
effectively lost control over what people were using.

In terms of giving away discs, I have sold CDs of Fedora (plus an
"extras disc" which set up the machine in the same way as the CS
department labs) in the past with a reasonable degree of success, though
I'm not sure if people wouldn't just download and burn their own ISOs
nowadays. I think I got through 75 or so 4 CD sets each year, so there's
an interest from the CS bods at least.

There are also people at various levels of the University (though not
many outside IT/CS as far as I'm aware) who use free software, but I'm
not sure how many of them do so for ethical reasons and how many use it
because, like me, they think it's the cheapest or best technical
solution.

Paul

-- 
Paul Waring
http://www.pwaring.com