Friday, August 07, 2009
Why aren't schools using open-source?
From http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/opensource/?p=811
This article was primarily aimed at K-12, which is a much different environment than higher ed. For one, the budgets are a lot smaller per-pupil. However, some of the questions do apply to us as well.
As it happens, part of our mandate is to prepare our students for the Real World (tm). And until very recently, Real World meant MS Office. We've been installing Open Office along side MS Office on our lab images for some time, and according to our lab managers they've seen a significant increase on OO usage. I'm sure part of this is due to the big interface change Microsoft pushed with Office 2007, but this may also be reflective of a shift in mind-share on the part of our incoming students. Parallel installs just work, so long as you have the disk space and CPU power it is very easy to set up.
Our choice of lab OS image has many complexities, not the least of which is a lack of certain applications. There are certain applications, of which Adobe Photoshop is but one, that don't have Linux versions yet. Because of this, Windows will remain.
We could do something like allow dual-boot workstations, or have a certain percentage of each lab as Linux stations. Hard drive sizes are big enough these days that we could dual-boot like that and still allow local-partition disk-imaging, and it would allow the student a choice in environments they can work in. Now that we're moving to a Windows environment, that actually better enables interoperability (samba). Novell's NCP client for Linux was iffy performance-wise, and we had political issues surrounding CIFS usage.
However... one of the obstacles in this is the lack of Linux workstation experience on the part of our lab managers. Running lab workstations is a constant cat and mouse game between students trying to do what they want, malware attempting to sneak in, and the manager attempting to keep a clean environment. You really want your lab-manager to be good at defensive desktop management, and that skill-set is very operating system dependent. Thus the reluctance regarding wide deployment of Linux in our labs.
Each professor can help urge OSS usage by not mandating file formats for homework submissions. The University as a whole can help urge it through retraining ITS staff in linux management, not just literacy. Certain faculty can promote it in their own classes, which some already do. But then, we have the budget flexibility to dual stack if we really want to.
This article was primarily aimed at K-12, which is a much different environment than higher ed. For one, the budgets are a lot smaller per-pupil. However, some of the questions do apply to us as well.
As it happens, part of our mandate is to prepare our students for the Real World (tm). And until very recently, Real World meant MS Office. We've been installing Open Office along side MS Office on our lab images for some time, and according to our lab managers they've seen a significant increase on OO usage. I'm sure part of this is due to the big interface change Microsoft pushed with Office 2007, but this may also be reflective of a shift in mind-share on the part of our incoming students. Parallel installs just work, so long as you have the disk space and CPU power it is very easy to set up.
Our choice of lab OS image has many complexities, not the least of which is a lack of certain applications. There are certain applications, of which Adobe Photoshop is but one, that don't have Linux versions yet. Because of this, Windows will remain.
We could do something like allow dual-boot workstations, or have a certain percentage of each lab as Linux stations. Hard drive sizes are big enough these days that we could dual-boot like that and still allow local-partition disk-imaging, and it would allow the student a choice in environments they can work in. Now that we're moving to a Windows environment, that actually better enables interoperability (samba). Novell's NCP client for Linux was iffy performance-wise, and we had political issues surrounding CIFS usage.
However... one of the obstacles in this is the lack of Linux workstation experience on the part of our lab managers. Running lab workstations is a constant cat and mouse game between students trying to do what they want, malware attempting to sneak in, and the manager attempting to keep a clean environment. You really want your lab-manager to be good at defensive desktop management, and that skill-set is very operating system dependent. Thus the reluctance regarding wide deployment of Linux in our labs.
Each professor can help urge OSS usage by not mandating file formats for homework submissions. The University as a whole can help urge it through retraining ITS staff in linux management, not just literacy. Certain faculty can promote it in their own classes, which some already do. But then, we have the budget flexibility to dual stack if we really want to.
<permalink> posted by riedesg : 8/07/2009 12:02:00 PM
