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[Paul Cory <paulwcory AT yahoo.com>]

> In the case of public
> schools with government funding, MS has to do the same as any 
> competitor,
> make a case for their ROI. Evaluated rationally and unemotionally, the 
> short
> and long term ROI for putting Linux schools and governments is clear. 
> All
> across the nation, schools and other government entities are going to be
> faced with this fact, and a large portion of them are going to be 
> adopting
> Linux. And they will be doing so not out of politics, but using they 
> same
> criteria they always use to choose IT systems.

As a government (school system) employee, I think the above assessment 
of Linux's chances in the government marketplace is overly optimistic. 
This is not an attempt to defend M$ and their predatory tactics, but 
rather a realistic assessment of the hurdles that face a school system 
in making the move from M$ to Linux or other free/open source OS. The 
hurdles are listed in no particular order. While these hurdles are based 
my observations on-the-job, they will hold true for almost all school 
systems nationwide. The bigger the school system, the bigger these 
hurdles become.

1. Training: All our employees are able to (minimally) use Windows. Our 
entire support staff is Windows knowledgeable and (mostly) Linux 
ignorant. Reality: our training budget is pathetic, way below private 
industry averages. We can't afford to train our IT staff, much less the 
rest of the employees, even minimally enough for them to be productive 
quickly. An incremental rollout might work, but the longer a process 
takes, the more open it is to political or economic sabotage.

2. Time/Staffing: We are way understaffed in the IT department. Managing 
such a massive changeover would be possible only on an incremental 
basis - which would spread the ROI out over many years, effectively 
reducing it (money we save 10 years from now is worth much less than 
money we save today).

3. Vendor contracts: We have contracts with hardware vendors to provide 
us computers at (supposedly) good prices. Those contracts would have to 
be renegotiated to remove the M$ tax. Not impossible, but a hurdle due 
to the time and effort involved. This would have to be done upfront, to 
start bringing in savings immediately.

4. It's not what we use at home/work: Parents are likely to resist such 
an effort on the grounds that they use M$ everywhere else and they want 
their kids to use it at school. There are three reasons for this: first, 
the mistaken belief that using the corporate standard in school will 
make their kids more employable, and second, they want their kids to be 
able to use the home computer for homework, etc, with a minimum of 
bother, and third, it removes them from their comfort zone with the 
technology their kids use at school.

5. Lack of software: A lot of educational software runs only on 
Windows/Macintosh. We have some large investments in instructional 
software that simply doesn't run natively on Linux. Wine or other 
emulator might be the answer, but we'd have to thoroughly test every 
package: see Time/Staffing (above). Also, we do make use packages that 
simply don't exist in the Linux space yet: Illustrator/Frreehand, 
PageMaker/Quark/(god help us)M$Publisher, Dreamweaver/FrontPage/GoLive. 
A text editor may be the only true way to make Web pages, but it takes a 
lot less training to use a graphical editor, see Training(above). :-) 
Framemaker is also subject to the Training problem, as well as an 
expense one.

6. Regulations: Lots of procurement regulations at the state and local 
levels would have to be rewritten to allow Open Source OSes and 
applications into the ballgame. Again, not impossible, but 
time-consuming and open to serious disruption by a targeted lobbying 
campaign.

7. Politics: Public schools and government agencies operate in an 
inherently political environment, subject to the meddling/oversight of 
multiple elected bodies (in our case, 4 elected bodies: school board, 
county commissioners, state legislature, and Congress), as well other 
government agencies (NCDPI, US Dept. of Ed, NC ITS). Each of these 
elected bodies/agencies represents an opportunity for a effective 
lobbying campaign to stop an Open Source initiative dead in its tracks. 
Also, in the case of the elected officials, see It's not what we use at 
home/work (above).

Obviously, there are small school systems/government agencies in this 
country where such hurdles are small enough to be overcome: especially 
ones where special instructional software packages are not used 
extensively.  But for the majority of school systems/government 
agencies, that list represents a formidable set of hurdles for Linux to 
overcome.

Also, I'd like to point out that there's been TCO (total cost of 
ownership)/ROI information available for years showing that Macintoshes 
are better investments than Wintel machines, especially when it comes to 
support staff to computer ratios. Despite this, Wintel boxes remain 
ensconced as the standard in government and industry. Long-term savings 
simply don't seem to affect decision-making much. :-(

Paul







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