RE: Linux in Universities
Mariland is spelled Maryland. Might want to fix that.
Also, I can vouch that a good number of student at Worcester Polytechnic
Institute in Mass use Linux. If you would like I can have a poll done
and give you the results. I attend this school and am a sys admin for
more than a dozen organizations with probably close to 75 machines under
my watch. All these machines run some linux distro ranging from gentoo
to debian. I am also an officer in the Linux Association for the
school. Anyway, let me know if you want any stats from WPI.
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"Geek by nature, Linux by choice."
-----Original Message-----
From: David P James [mailto:dpjames@rogers.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2002 4:16 PM
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Linux in Universities
Dan Kegel was roused into action on 09/12/02 12:48 and wrote:
> Hi all,
> not quite who to contact to get input from the Debian project on this
> -- apologies if "debian-user" isn't the right place.
>
> I've put together a resource page re "Linux in Universities" at
> http://www.kegel.com/linux/edu/ My goal is to encourage universities
> to support Linux and free software in general, and to provide
> information on the current state of Linux support at universities.
>
> I would appreciate your feedback on the content. If there's anything
> missing there from your point of view, please let me know, and I'll
> see if I can fix it.
>
Two things:
(1) I don't know how or if this fits, but for what it is worth the
department of economics here at Queen's runs on Debian servers, and has
some Debian-based workstations available for use by grad students and
faculty. However, the workstations used by undergrad students (and
many/most grad students) are all Windows-based. The difficulty, I guess,
is that to have the workstations of undergrads being linux-based would
entail some additional amount of support that the department really
can't provide, even though I am sure they would like to be able to. Just
training students to mount and unmount a floppy for instance, as we use
floppies for data storage quite a bit. Not a big task, but nevertheless,
who is going to do it?
QED Website:
http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/
and, particularly worth reading,
http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/pub/computer/advice.htm
(2) In the second paragraph under the heading "Linux as an aid in the
fight against Software Piracy" we see the following line:
"Universities could avoid that problem by requiring the use of free Open
Source software..."
To me, the notion of "requiring" the use of "free" software is
practically a contradiction in terms, and most definitely a
contradiction in philosophy. A better way to go about it would be
requiring adherence to open standards as much as is practicable. Then
students would be free to choose between open source or commercial
software as they saw fit.
--
David P. James
4th Year Economics Student
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario
http://members.rogers.com/dpjames/
The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe. -Dr.
Leonard McCoy, Star Trek IV
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