Some time ago I had a heated discussion with one of my friends who is on the board of governors of a local school. The argument went like this:
- Me: “What a waste of public money using MS products to teach our kids computers. The licence fees the schools pay is huge – they should use open source software”
- Him: “They are learning to use the predominant platform and software in the job marketplace. Open software is not used anywhere so it doesn’t make sense to teach that. Add to that all the retraining of staff, rewriting of courses it’s not going to happen”
- Me: “By the time our kids (who were in junior school) are going into the job market, all the software will have changed anyway so the skills they are learning now will be useless. Better to teach generic skills on open software”
…… and so on. This is a perfectly normal thing for he and I to do because my friend is a staunch MS Fanboy and I am a Mac Fanboy so we normally spend about 50% of our time arguing over who’s platform is better. It is our equivalent to religious or political discussion and fills the empty space left by our atheism and apathy of UK politics.
I thought I was onto a winner this time because I was backing OSS. I knew he wouldn’t have the cost card to play as he normally holds over the Mac (in fact I used that particular one with good effect back on him for once). Zero cost hardware difference and free software! In actual fact, old hardware lasts longer with the low footprint of most OSS.
As is the case with all zealous arguments, neither one of us would admit we were wrong (after all we are zealots – how could we be wrong?), and we agreed to disagree – again.
You can imagine then that warm feeling in the righteous part of my psyche when I read in Computerworld today that Becta – that’s the organisation that governs what IT our schools and collages use, said that using OSS would save the average school £200k a year.
The quality of software like edbuntu and other education based software is very good. Documentation is getting better all the time and the communites around them offer fantastic support for no or little cost.
I hope that this initiative and guidance by Becta is taken on board and we see more of that school funding going towards teachers and resources and less into Microsoft’s extremely large pockets.