[K12OSN] Given this situation, why bother continue with LTSP?

[Petre Scheie]

There's also a subtle but important difference in the philosophical underpinnings of 
Linux vs. Windows: While you might get the Windows licenses for free, MS ultimately is 
still after your money; perhaps you didn't spend the money, but your benefactor did.  Or 
if the licenses were donated by MS, they did so with the hope that at some point you 
will buy more, so the donations are just seeding.  To make money they have to control 
the access to their software, to restrict access to it. Notice that in their latest 
Office offering, the XML file format (which is only available in the more expensive 
versions) isn't really open nor designed for interoperability with non-MS software. 
There's nothing sinister about it, since MS is a business, and therefore its reason for 
existing is to make money.  But I don't think your school & church exist to provide 
financial support for MS.  Linux's reason for existence isn't to make money, but to 
allow people to use computers.  Some companies make money out of it, after the fact, but 
they don't control the access to it, which means others can make it freely available if 
they so desire.  And in the case of K12LTSP, enough people desire so to have created a 
community that supports that freedom.

Limiting access to software, like Windows, et al, would be similar to a school telling 
its students that they can't share with others whatever the school teaches them.  Linux 
says share all you want, and you'll be surprised what people come up with, for example, 
Knoppix and LTSP.  Again, it's not illegal or sinister, and the people who work for MS 
aren't monsters.  It's just that they way they want the world to work is inconsistent 
with what schools are trying to do, whereas Linux is much the same as schools.

As others have pointed out, by the time the kids get out of school and into business, 
the MS tools they used in school will no longer be current.  But there's a bigger 
paradigm shift going on, which is being missed by the people who say kids should use 
Windows because that's what businesses use.  In ten years the software landscape will 
probably look quite different from today, as OSS continues to ascend at the expense of 
proprietary software, perhaps glacially but nevertheless inevitably.  The internet makes 
this all possible.  Kids are quite familiar with downloading such things as music (as 
are a fair number of adults).  However, there's a moral and legal impediment in that 
some/much/most of the music available online wasn't intended by its creators to be 
freely available.  Yet imagine if it were.  I think people would come up with all sorts 
of creative things if they had unlimited access to music files.  Now substitute software 
for music, software that is intended to be freely shared, which people do re-combine to 
make new things.  I'm not sure how the music sharing bit will play out, and I think 
there will always be some proprietary software for narrow markets (word processors and 
spreadsheets are not narrow markets).  But understanding how the internet allows sharing 
and collaboration and connecting with others is what matters, and proprietary software 
like that of MS only inhibits participating in that.  Choosing Windows over Linux is to 
choose yesterday's technology over tomorrow's.

Petre


Doug Simpson wrote:
> 
> Doug Simpson
> Technology Specialist
> DeQueen Public Schools
> DeQueen, AR 71832
> simpsond at leopards.k12.ar.us
> Tux for President!
> 
> On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, Rob Owens wrote:
> 
> 
>>2 more comments:
>>
>>1)  If the parents think the children are being
>>somehow handicapped by using Linux, they should be
>>shown some of the articles I've seen on the internet
>>about the salaries of Linux admins vs. Windows admins.
> 
> 
> URLs please!!!!!
> 
> 
>>2)  The basics of Linux do not change much.  Since I
>>started learning how Linux works about a year and a
>>half ago, I truly feel that I am learning valuable
>>information.  More and more I feel that any time I
>>spend to learn something in Windows is a waste of my
>>time.  This is because every release of Windows does
>>something a little bit differently.  I have had
>>questions about how to set up my network in Linux--I
>>researched the internet, and found a how-to from 10
>>years ago that still applies today.  In my estimation,
>>time spent learning Linux is time well spent.
>>
>>-Rob
>>
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