Actually, I meant 'free' in both senses, but mostly in the sense of
'free of charge'. I hate to be blunt, but I think it's pretty safe to
say that Ubuntu, Koha, GIMP, OpenOffice, Joomla and even the option of
Linux itself would never exist or have gained traction and a developer
base if these products were not freely available. Groovix and Userful
are selling proprietary public-use computer management packages at a
higher cost than their XP equivalents. If an open source LTSP solution
were available under Linux (as in the Edubuntu package for schools) I
would be much happier about recommending Linux as a solution for
public-use computers in small to medium-sized independent public
libraries.
Again, I would invite those interested in providing help on this project
to look at the feature list of 'Time Limit Manager' from Fortres --
that's what I want in an LTSP package. (As an analogy, remember that
Koha was once just an idea floating around in some idealistic New
Zealander's head.)
http://www.fortresgrand.com/products/tlm/tlm.htm
Cheers,
-- Darrell
Erik Hetzner wrote:
At Tue, 30 Dec 2008 14:28:44 -0800,
Karen Coyle <[email protected]> wrote:
Darrell Eifert wrote:
There are commercial options from Groovix or Userful, but that pretty
much defeats the practical goal of lowering IT costs, or the
ideological goal of moving to free and open-source applications.
I have a hard time considering "free" (as in "not paying for") as
ideological. If linux is a good desktop, the "freeness" is icing on the
cake. (And it's only free as in the purchase price; you still pay in
some way to maintain it.) If you need to purchase apps to make your
library work as it should, then you should budget for that. I think we
need to see "free" and "open source" as two different properties that
MAY intersect but do not necessarily intersect.
kc
(who prefers linux to windows, and is looking forward to being able to
purchase my favorite apps for linux as they become available)
I think that Darrell probably meant ‘free’ in the GNU sense:
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html>
best, Erik
------------------------------------------------------------------------
;; Erik Hetzner, California Digital Library
;; gnupg key id: 1024D/01DB07E3
--
-------------------------------------
Darrell Eifert
Head of Adult Services
Lane Memorial Library, Hampton NH
"Beware the man of only one book"
Old Latin proverb
