I work in IT support in a secondary school. Heads of ICT are reluctant to go down the road of having Linux based systems because of a percieved (probably correctly) lack of people out there who can support it. I've managed to persuade our head of faculty to let me set lose some Linux servers here but in fairness there are not so many barriers to putting open source apps that run on Windows into the network. We are going to put GNUCash on soon now it's officially ported to Windows. I see no technical barrier to OpenOffice going into schools both in curriculum and administrative systems.
Hope it happens widely.
On 10/09/2007, Kevanf1 <kevanf1@gmail.com> wrote:
Sadly it's not quite as easy as asking the school to support an open
standard. Most school IT policy is formulated by a bunch of suits
that form a section of the LEA (Local Education Authority). It's
these guys that need to learn the lesson. The trouble is deals get
made. I'm not talking shady, under the counter stuff here just basic
"buy these PC's and this server and we'll throw in X copies of Win
XP/Vista together with X amount of copies of MS Office." This is
money men not IT professionals, all they see is that they 'think' they
are getting a bargain and so they go for it. Tell them about Linux
and they think something is dodgy when you tell them it is free.
The few schools that have some level of control of their IT budget are
often too scared to go down the open source route because the main IT
support tell them that they will not support anything other than MS
products....
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==============================================
Kevan Farmer
Linux user #373362
Staffordshire
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