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  • From: Paul Cory <paulwcory AT yahoo.com>
  • To: "InterNetWorkers" <internetworkers AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: MS Goes After Schools Evaluating Linux
  • Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 15:17:52 -0400


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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