> > How as a FOSS company are you going to maintain a > well-staffed callout > > team and helpdesk if the software you are providing is essentially > > free? > > Why is that a problem? My companies have never had a problem > charging for support for Free Software. All software needs support. > > > You can't justify far higher support contract charges for > that reason > > alone, and schools will either bring the required talent in-house > > Schools don't pay enough to attract good suport staff :-( > > > or source it locally - and bingo, just like that, your > company is out > > of business. > > So think local. How many schols are there within 40 miles of you?=
(by the way Richard, I believe we may have conversed before this evening, offline :) Thistle, last year?) Oh, there are many schools in my area. There's one about a third of a mile away from my doorstep! > You seem to be saying that although the status quo is not > good (indeed, it is delivering a second-cless education), > there's no easy way out, so let's leave things as they are. > If I have mis-characterised your argument, I apologise, but > let's sidestep that. After all, you're barking up the wrong tree. You're somewhat on target; my final comment on this for the time being is that I think the current situation is far from ideal, but I freely admit that I have no fantastical solution which will make everything better. (the educational goldmine?) I know that M6-IT is somewhat unique in how it operates, including recycling legacy gear and giving it a new lease of life with quality FOSS to provide custom solutions that fit in where other proprietary solutions may not have worked as efficiently (it's a great thing!) - but M6 is also slightly different in its model, aiming itself as it does as a social enterprise for the voluntary and educational sectors. How many schools do you serve in your locality? (just curious...) Your model obviously works exceptionally well for what you do, but I wonder how big your client base is versus how big it could potentially be if you supported every school in the area - you could get very big, very fast, or the ground could open up for competition and aside from lower costs to the end users, there might be an even greater disparity in levels of support or the kinds of solutions delivered. I suppose the one sad fact about the current MS incumbency is that there can be some predictable level of consistency throughout the LEA. I'm fed up to the back teeth as much as anyone at some counties (including where my parents live) where the council has a massive arrangement with Dell - for the kind of service they get, they must literally parachute bags of money into Dell's UK HQ, and I think it's good money mostly wasted. > The model of maintaining individually-installed apps over > several discrete PCs was all very well in the 80s, and > possibly the 90s, but how long before schools catch up with > the rest of the world. PCs in schools are mandated to teach > curriculum areas - this can easily be delivered through 500 - > 600 web apps. The whole curriculum. A small investment from > government (less than 1% of the UK's annual school IT spend) > would get all of these apps written. Released under the GNU > GPL, they would be tweaked and improved by thousands of > teachers and students. > Given web apps, designed to work with standards-compliant > browsers, it becomes irrelevant which platform is used to > view them, save on grounds of cost and maintainability. The > obvious choice then is LTSP. Personal opinion: 95% of web apps just don't cut it. If you're talking about SaaS, the problems highlighted by Salesforce.com's recent downtime are testament to that - and as I'm sure you're well aware, school timetables and the National Curriculum have even less margin for troubleshooting IT than even the business sector. If I was a teacher I would hate it hate it hate it if I couldn't teach a class because the main host server was bogged down with too many intensive tasks, or it fell over or lagged out or needed to be failed over for some reason. There's a new build school in Bucks which is currently under construction; unfortunately it looks like not enough forethought was paid to the IT infrastructure so it becomes horrendously unfeasible, perhaps even impossible, to implement the kind of high quality, high bandwidth and low latency network a totally thin-client based network would require. (right down to simple things such as impossible corners for bundles of fibre to go round, poorly chosen rooms for network nodes in context of rooms where computers will be installed, and architectural features that can't have ducting run along them as it would spoil the visual presentation! So the fibre has to take a massively long route all the way around instead, hugely increasing the cost.) Of course, not every school is (hopefully) going to be designed like this, but it's not great... I think a lot of educational ICT systems have these kinds of compromises. It also, like all new schools that will be built from now on, has some mad passive cooling requirements due to environmental restrictions; no A/C, geothermal heating/cooling, plus windowless classrooms etc... Of course this is a perfect scenario in theory for thin clients, but unfortunately their continued impracticalities wrt their raw power and capabilities leaves a lot to be desired. If I was speccing a school's IT, I don't think thin clients would get much way past the first round of planning unless some incredibly well-designed thin client solutions were brought to my attention (and then you're talking equivalent prices for thin clients as you would for regular MiniATX desktops). I'm still personally very sceptical of thin client solutions, I don't think their capabilities ar sufficient to satisfy all the potential uses for educational machines. And I wouldn't like to have all that total reliance on just a handful of extremely powerful servers; it's bad enough when the Internet proxy server goes down or the network drive can't be accessed because the Active Directory is having a fit, but to have a classful of children sitting in front of dumb terminals when the primary host server for that classroom's client machines goes down? Wuh oh. Maybe my mistrust is misplaced, and thin clients are actually really quite good at most things now... Perhaps my perception of them, like many other peoples', is part of the problem which needs to be addressed. There must be some reason other than bloody-mindedness that makes schools keep on going for full-PC solutions time after time though... I do aim to do more work in the educational sector as my own business gets going in the next few years, and I want to offer all kinds of viable solutions as long as they work well for everybody. Do you really think that setups like the LTSP are as competitive as regular networks of fairly powerful x86 machines and central file/print/etc servers for secondary school environments? (not being sarkies here, genuinely interested to know your thoughts and prepared to do a lot of reading if you have suggested starting points). Wrt to government-funded FOSS development for education: unfortunately I have even less faith in UK.gov to sensibly sort out this kind of project than the faith I would have in the private sector accomplishing this; look at how many tens of billons of pounds they've blown getting their NHS computer system up and running! iSoft have to be the best-paid vapourware company in the UK, because the lights at their Banbury offices are still very much on every time I drive past on the M40... The phrase 'unable to organise drinking session in local brewery' springs to mind when I think of UK.gov implementing a well-organised national scheme for FOSS applications on a FOSS platform. And given the mad state of affairs we're in today, might not the Competition Commission declare that UK.gov pouring all this taxpayer money into developing applications for schools to be horribly anti-competitive as it's undercutting the commercial market? And unless they mandated that all schools implement their FOSS package, I have a feeling that most schools would carry on using their existing setups regardless because it's too much hassle to change. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
