[ILUG] Typical - Schools / vendor lockin.

[John Madden]

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On (10/04/08 10:08), Gavin McCullagh said:
> By "we" do you mean ILUG, the government, the country at large or some
> other group?  I'd certainly agree that linux advocates should aim towards
> open technologies in schools.  How will students benefit from this choice
> though -- in reality, not the idealistic "all students could be hackers!"
> world?
> 
Without going into how students could benefit from using Linux over
Windows, surely there's an argument for providing both, so students have
a choice to at least _try_ a different OS?

In terms of the "we", I think something put together by ILUG could
succeed here.

I agree with what you're saying about the cost, staffing, administration
etc. of a purely Linux / OSS based network in a school as opposed to a
Windows / proprietary one.

However, we regularly see old hardware going cheap / for free on this
list. Camara (I think) refurbish these PCs to send to Africa or wherever
(sorry - I'm not up on the actual details of it). Would it be an idea to
try and form a few small groups in ILUG populated areas (eg. Dublin,
Galway, Cork, Limerick) with a few people who are willing to give a few
hours to refurbish a desktop / server, install a standard distro &
packages and deliver a small (maybe 5 - 10 PCs) OSS powered network to a
school, and offer to do the maintainance afterwards. I am, of course,
presuming that, like most OSS stuff I've used over the last number of
years, once it's working it stays working and doesn't require much
maintainance.

This would, hopefully, be a minimal cost to the school in question
(amounting only to electricity and desk space) and would also expose
students, and teachers, to free & open source software. I do firmly
believe that exposure to open source software has given me a better
understanding of computing, software and system administration. I also
see a move in industry towards employing and modifying open source
software. Educating even a small number of interested students in OSS
early in life could provide them with a very lucrative career choice
after college.

This could be a nice project to tie in with a revival of scoil.linux.ie.

> I'm going to bow out of this argument now as I've said far too much
> already.
> 
I didn't want to get involved in the first place!!

- -- 
John Madden -- john at jmadden.eu
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