[K12OSN] When Free Isn’t Free: The realities of running open source in school

[James P. Kinney III]

Looks like another school that tried to run a large Linux installation
with Windows admins to me.

The greatest challenge to Linux adoption is getting past the FUD spread
by articles such as that. There are competent tools to manage a
multi-thousand seat installation of Linux. The don't run on windows and
are typically not going to be installable by windows admins recently
converting to Linux admins.  The typical desktop windows user can't run
an exchange server either.

Most large scale system admins have the skills to craft their own set of
scripts to augment the distributions native management tools sets.
Simple reset ability such as an overwrite from /etc/skel can solve a
huge number of student made environment issues. Changing ownership of
all user config files ("dot" files) to be root owned and user readable
prevents users from changing settings.

Single sign-on is handled by tools that don't involve a windows Active
Directory service. LDAP is a main one. 

But the real clinker in the article was the realization that the school
tried to use SuSe Linux. Novell seems to have no interest in helping
schools adopt Linux nor will they as long as schools fork out big bucks
for Novell licenses.

But most importantly, the school system moved faster than their
abilities could keep up. Transitioning from <old windows> to <new
windows> is also fraught with a mountain of issues. Most of those issues
are similar to what the article spoke about. 

The problems that were the exception were the pre-packaged classroom
tools near total lack of availability for the Linux environment. Sadly,
this is an issue that will not go away until the teachers and schools
using Linux craft their own and seed the knowledge bank by publishing
their effort using an open source license like Creative Commons or
similar so that other Linux-savvy schools can add to the collection.
This problem will not be solved by the traditional textbook publisher
crowd. We will have to do it ourselves.


On Fri, 2009-03-20 at 07:55 +0800, Leo Willems wrote:
> When Free Isn’t Free: The realities of running open source in school
> 
> http://www.techlearning.com/article/16504
> 
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> 
-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC                           
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7


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