On 17/01/07, London School of Puppetry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Could someone outline for me the benefits of using OSS in schools and other > publicly funded bodies- I feel in need of someone with knowledge to tell me, > Caroline
I would expect the GNU guys to have a page about this on their website, and here it is: <http://www.gnu.org/education/education.html> Some reasons off the top of my head: 1. Price (its often free of cost) 2. No single vendor lock in, Free Open Source software can be examined and thus you can produce other compatible programs to read any files you may have had. You can also port them o different systems if you want. 3. Security. Schools hold sensitive information. If you use non-free software you can not accurately determine what the program is doing, it could be sending sensitive information back to its creator or could have deliberate backdoors in it. No-one but Microsoft knows if Windows contains such backdoors, but there is more evidence to suggest it does have backdoors than evidence to suggest it doesn't. 4. Ability to provide software to students, schools can allow students to do work at home, such as writing essays, as long as they have a PC if the school uses Free software then they can give out copies. This allows poorer people to receive a better education, as much software is now more expensive than the minimum hardware needed for a working system. (MS Office 2003, student version: £119.99 WinXP home SP2 £176.99 source Amazon.co.uk) ArsTechnica budget box is $500, (roughly £250), thus hardware cheaper than the MS OS and Office suite. And that's not counting all the other software. Or is it OK to require people to have money to get an education? 5. Ability to learn from the software. All the source code is available. If a student asks 'how does this program work', you can give them the source code to find out for themselves. 6. Ability to adapt it to work with the schools system. 7. Ability to fix problems with the software if/when the vendor refuses to (and yes vendors like Microsoft have refused to fix serious security issues, let alone bugs) 8. Reassurance the program isn't going to suddenly stop being maintained. If the company hat creates it folds another company can work on it from where the dead company left off. 9. Effective use of British tax payers money. Should British tax payer money be spent on strengthening a foreign monopoly? Surely it should support British software companies. (And we all know that Canonical is registered in the Isle of Man right?) Also you may want to look at the Becta report. <http://www.becta.org.uk/corporate/press_out.cfm?id=4681> _ Andy -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/
