On Tuesday 10 May 2005 07:59, Thomas Templin wrote:
> So you will tell us that a school authoritive who has the coice to
> have an old fashioned Debian-Edu developed and offered by hobbyists
> or to have a brand new MS-Windows offered by professional marketing
> people supported by a million dollar marketing branch will choose
> Debian-Edu?
lets rephrase that:
so you will tell school authoritives that they have the choice between a
Debian-Edu system they won't have to spend a lot of babysitting once set
upwith, developed by what is widely seen as one of the most (if not the
most) reliable computing systems around, that can run on their exising hard
ware
or use a system made by a company that's renowned for forcing upgrades on
clients at high cost, and breaking things with 'critical updates' every
ones in a while, that will need the latest hardware at every upgrade.
> <sarcasm>
> But Debian is stable.
> And it will be released when it will be released.
> Praise the lord that Debian came up when punch cards are no longer
> in use anymore. That was stable, much more than CDs are.
> </sarcasm>
It's been how long since XP was released? And Longhorn has slipped their
release date how many times (unlike Debian while dropping expected
features)? -> MS can hardly use this as a positive argument
Besides which do you actually know of _any_ school that would chose to
upgrade all their systems (at considerable time, effort and expense) when
they can just keep running their exisiting stuff (without problems)?
Note that most schools I know of are now moaning they can't keep running
their windows 98 systems (yes 7 years after it was released)
Also note that I've yet to see a windows system that you can just keep
running without problems (windows update alone will screw that up every
once in a while)
(know the old sysadmin addage: don't change a working system?)
HINT: the long release cycle is _not_ the problem, the relative immaturity
of the Free software Desktop at the time of the last Debian release is.
> - You know that schools are offered MS OS and Software for free more
> and more?
yeah, for the first iteration, then your locked in and they try their
hardest to force you to upgrade (They did the almost free thing in the
Netherlands, now they're showing all the signs that they're going to up the
price sometime soon, and they already stopped supporting 98, thus forcing
schools to upgrade to XP as several problems have appeared)
> - You know that MS offers free training for authoritives and admins
> more and more?
most schools don't have the time to administer a windows network on their
own, it simply takes to much time. Even if they had time, most schools
don't want to administer their network, they'd rather leave that up to
someone else.
> - You know that MS gives a financial support for hardware more and
> more?
some places, I have yet to see them offer hardware in Belgium/The
Netherlands
> - You know that MS offers their OS on a cheap base just in those
> countries where Free Software starts to have a good chance in the
> market?
hardware requirements alone make it more expensive (no way MS is going to
offer schools anything other then versions of XP)
> So the cost arguments are dissapearing, they may be against free
> software in only a year or two if MS goes on as they start do do in
> the moment.
I'll believe that when I see it:
1) free software can be run on lower specs hardware -> translates to lower
cost hardware, even skipping a single upgrade translates to major savings.
(I haven't ever seen MS go down in minimum specs with newer versions, or
even stay the same)
2) free software has no licence fees -> okay this one they can (mostly)
negate for their own software (that still leaves things like virus
scanners, you just have to have on windows though)
3) with free software you don't have to spend (a lot of) time and effort
keeping track of licences (which gets messy and timeconsuming fast), the
BSA has come down on schools in the past, so this isn't something you can
ignore.
4) With free software you're not at the mercy of a third party living of
lock-in (that goes for both bugs and upgrades)
5) with free software you can script all the routine maintenance tasks
(translating to lower TCO), with MS you mostly can't
> Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom! http://www.fsfe.org/
I have :-)
--
cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis):
Coördinator Belgisch Skolelinux team
Coördinator Nederlandse Skolelinux vertaling
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