Schools should be using open source software

I was an IT manager in a school (not any more), and was asked by a parent why I wasn’t using Linux everywhere.<p>Our Microsoft licensing cost £1000 per year, and our MSP cost about £10,000 for remote support and a weekly onsite.<p>Using Linux, our licensing cost would have gone, and maybe we’d have gotten another year or two from desktop hardware, but our support costs would have increased massively - I couldn’t find a local msp who’d do desktop Linux support the same way we were getting. not to mention all the training for teachers, and the nightmare of finding replacements for things like smart notebook, custom assessment software, and windows only curriculum software.<p>Biggest headache would have been the teachers. Some of them found windows 10 too difficult to use, and pushing them onto Linux would have needed a full time techie on hand.<p><i>linux is better</i> is not always the case.

&gt; Photoshop. Illustrator. Why are these the first applications used for image editing and creation?<p>Because they&#x27;re bloody good (well, Photoshop is). And Gimp isn&#x27;t.<p>&gt; Coding IDE (optional) ===&gt; vim<p>That&#x27;s not out of touch, that&#x27;s beyond the pale.

Schools need long term turnkey solutions that offer support and someone who will pick up the phone when they call. The school district I went to used macs and you were allowed to install whatever browser you wanted on them. We used google drive or just the hard drive to store files. Forcing folks to use niche software means they cannot just use whatever the rest of the world is using when they graduate. Teachers, parents, students, etc would need to learn these new programs that they haven&#x27;t used before. I don&#x27;t really seen any positives to this except a feel good story about open source. Who actually knows what the costs would be? The support time? Etc. I&#x27;m sure there will be a lot of school sysadmins reading this and thinking &quot;please just stay in your lane.&quot;

You can tell this person is out of touch and doesn’t actually have any experience of the systems they’re complaining about, because they think people are still using IE and Word over Chrome and Google Docs.

As far as I know most industries other than the software industry uses Windows, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop, Illustrator etc and not any of these open source ones.<p>&gt; IT departments could opt to use any one of the lightweight Linux distros available.<p>Which one? That is the problem and don&#x27;t get me started on tech support.<p>This screams completely out of touch.

&gt; Word, Excel, PowerPoint. Why have these become the &quot;standard&quot; of text manipulation and processing?<p>I hate to break this to you, but because (especially for PowerPoint) these are legitimately among the best options, at the very least, distinctly better than any open-source office offerings. Maybe the author is unaware of how well these programs do in their roles because they&#x27;ve been actively avoiding any situation that would call for the use of these or similar programs... the use of a plain text document, not even a lightly-formatted HTML document, makes me think that they actively go out of their way to avoid using a word processor.

This person is totally out of touch with reality.<p>I do agree, however, that public entities should lean on open-source software where possible. It&#x27;s our tax money that&#x27;s paying for all those licenses. I see no point in govt agencies requiring windows licenses when most of the work can be done through the Office suite in a web browser.

I&#x27;m from Argentina. We have a OLPC like plan named &quot;Conectar Igualdad&quot; And the City of Buenos Aires had (or have, I don&#x27;t know if still running) another one named &quot;Plan Sarmiento&quot;.<p>Both plans were the battle zone between Microsoft and open source software community.<p>For the first plan, the government started a project named Huayra Linux, a debian derivate with a bunch of software designed here for the kids. For Sarmiento, it came with a debian tweaked installation, that was barely working because the closed source of the wimax chipset (it was only working for windows, and yes, the students had free internet in the city)<p>The battle was so hard, that Microsoft licensed the windows distribution for 1 dollar each, and they got a contract where all the machines must to be installed with windows.<p>Despite a lot of trials and errors, a lot of work without a project to learn from (maybe ceybal from uruguay is the closest example of a really well project) and the scale (I&#x27;m talking about millions of notebooks) I&#x27;m sure that open source software is the best from a IT perspective, from social perspective and with the best margin to build things that your school, your students, your city or country needs.

Some time ago, I had the opportunity to speak frankly with the then CTO of the NYC department of education, and pitched them on the idea of replacing Windows with Linux, or at least MS Office with OpenOffice, touting both the Free-as-in-Speech and Free-as-in-Beer benefits, as well as the lower hardware costs.<p>What they told me was that similar pitches from vendors like RedHat were useful to them in that they invariably prompted Microsoft to offer a deal, IIRC, somewhere around 1$&#x2F;month&#x2F;computer (annually, about the cost of a new keyboard; which they had to buy a lot of), and that they had to replace the computer hardware often enough due to wear and tear (students are <i>very</i> hard on computers) that the hardware savings would be illusory.<p>If I were to try and make a similar pitch today I might try calculating in the cost of electricity, but there is simply no way Microsoft is going to let itself be undercut on price for the software per-se for those big marquee accounts.<p>Of course when taking competitive bids like that, you really should price in the eventual switching costs when comparing bids, but hardly anyone does that correctly in the public OR private sector, and sunk-cost fallacies tends to overwhelm the decision making process.

Sharing from my experience of selling SaaS products for school management to schools -<p>1. School staff is not tech savy. They can not install or manage open source easily.<p>2. They mostly prefer commercial software with paid support. Software is critical to them but not their main business. They lack expertise and willingness to go for Open source software.

I am beyond livid that my kids have to use this Google classroom bullshit. I have zero doubts they are building profiles on our kids no matter what the lying liars at the top say.<p>I keep telling my wife, “I still cannot believe that a multinational ADVERTISING company is being used to “teach” kids”. It is so incredibly stupid when you look at it for what it is.<p>I hope Larry and Sergey are loving this monster they created.

Wow, I didn&#x27;t expect to see so much pushback from the community here. This sounds pretty obvious to me.<p>Gimp is really not adequate for everyday usage compared with Photoshop? Really?<p>LibreOffice&#x2F;OpenOffice doesn&#x27;t provide adequate alternatives to spreadsheet&#x2F;doc&#x2F;csv? Really?<p>Notepad++ is not good enough of a text editor? Really?<p>One semi valid criticism is that there isn&#x27;t a support infrastructure to help organizations with their open source needs. While I don&#x27;t believe it on it&#x27;s face, regardless, this is an opportunity to push for that infrastructure and to help every single FOSS project with funding to support the community needs.<p>Public infrastructure should not be captured by vendor lock-in.

I can count on one hand the number of teachers that I had in high school that would be able to maintain the use of open source software for their classrooms.. one did (eclipse for CS AP) and the other was the web design prof who had a decent understanding of computers.<p>The rest of the teachers and actually many of the students too were not technically inclined enough to be able to deal with the issues that can come up in open source software, and that would&#x27;ve for sure overwhelmed the like two IT dudes who were already busy regularly having to fix projectors and SmartBoard problems

This article discusses end user applications, but nothing regarding the classroom experience. (E.g., how does the teacher monitor individual screens to ensure they&#x27;re staying on task?) My wife is a teacher and google classroom is what most of the districts in this area leverage.

You know a person have no clue about education when they suggest to use vim to teach people how to code.

Interestingly, many schools are now using ChromeOS, a &quot;locked-down&quot; version of linux.<p>Alas, only Chrome and Google-based applications are allowed; however, it&#x27;s a good step away from more expensive products.

There needs to be a, &quot;third way&quot; developed that isn&#x27;t, &quot;FOSS&#x2F;Open Source&quot; or, &quot;Proprietary.&quot; It&#x27;s worth remembering how much of the revolutionary computing of the 194&#x2F;5&#x2F;60&#x27;s was developed using models that tactfully combined private and public industry. Programs like ARPA provided funding for open ended research which gave us the Alta and the ARPANet (thanks Lick!) while companies like IBM performed an important social function in providing especially young engineers with cutting edge jobs during their golden era. There&#x27;s a vivid history on this subject that&#x27;s worth looking into.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;press.stripe.com&#x2F;the-dream-machine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;press.stripe.com&#x2F;the-dream-machine</a><p>If we&#x27;re going to be adults about the thing-- Developing technology requires global or at least national stability. Global stability traditionally has, &quot;required&quot; global hegemony. Developing technology allows the United States and her allies to to remain technically ahead of competing nations which in a feedback loop allows for the development of further technology. There&#x27;s a sideways argument that in truth, in some sense, that the technology we, &quot;ought&quot; (Hume) to be using in schools should be, &quot;nationalized&quot; in the same sense that the, &quot;internet&quot; as a tangible infrastructure is a, &quot;national&quot; resource. Imagine a kind of Sudbury School where children use advanced, &quot;democracy computers&quot; to, &quot;rehearse&quot; avid citizenship given the political constraints of our society. The computer could facilitate a social revolution in an educational setting if used in this manner. I really do think this is what Alan C. Kay is talking about when he says, &quot;the computing revolution hasn&#x27;t happened yet.&quot;<p>Also HyperCard! and Project Xanadu! and Blackjack! and Hookers! (Exclamation point!)

With open source you typically trade polish and easy-of-use for customizability and transparency. I feel like that’s the opposite of what school staff need, who are typically overworked and want simplicity above anything else. They need technology that is as transparent as possible, and open source software is typically not that.

Not only schools, but any public entity. Taxpayer dollars should be respected. That means embracing lower cost options, supporting open source projects, and pushing for right to repair.

After reading through the post, I think that more, if not almost all, posts should be in plain text.

The &quot;job market&quot; argument no longer holds up with Google ruling the education roost. You won&#x27;t see Chromebooks or GSuite&#x27;s Docs&#x2F;Sheets used in enterprise as frequently as Microsoft&#x27;s products.

Personally, I think the argument today is different. I see the kinds of data being collected about my child by school ed-tech vendors, and it&#x27;s scary.<p>Looking backwards in history, Nazi Germany and Soviet police states are good examples of why having people know too much about you can get you killed, depending on political system.<p>Looking at the present, people&#x27;s jobs and political careers are destroyed for having said things which were mainstream views a half-century ago. Statues are torn down of people who held perfectly mainstream views 150 years ago. I have no idea which of the things my child says and knows now will be taboo in another 50 years. I do know the schools are storing all of that in archives with a whole bunch of fly-by-night ed-tech vendors.<p>I don&#x27;t know how this is going to end, but mark my words: This will end badly. We have a history and a present of persecuting people for less, and privacy is what protects us.

They should also cook food and prepare beverages instead of selling branded packaged products.<p>But that&#x27;s not what&#x27;s profitable.

I&#x27;m a huge Linux guy, but I&#x27;m comfortable jettisoning most of the concrete suggestions in this article because we now have the benefit of time and these technologies are all practically open enough. Few, if any, today are <i>dangerously restrictive</i> even though back then it made sense to be worried.<p>&quot;Microsoft Word&quot; is generally fine because we have Google and Libreoffice, etc. An important note I&#x27;d include is -- we probably have these things because of the pressure of the free and open source software that does exist.<p>But what I primarily want to mention is that there is a looming uncertain threat of dangerously restrictive software that is not practically open enough. This is the &quot;LMS.&quot; Canvas, Blackboard et al. This is where the energy and pressure of FOSS type principles needs to be pointed at today.

I think the funniest thing about the post and the whole thread is how little (unfortunately) the rest of the world care about open source. And why should they? It&#x27;s a true non-issue for them.<p>If I were school governor I&#x27;d be running everything on Chromebooks by now. Free storage, sync and applications.

Like any organization, things have to be reliable and some open-source doesn’t really have the support model figured out.<p>And if cost is an issue, that is more an indictment of how schools are funded: if there doesn’t seem to be room in the budget for buying software and&#x2F;or support, why is that the budget?

I definitely agree with this, and my only real &quot;complaint&quot; is that this applies to not just schools, but everywhere.<p>For schools, I&#x27;d definitely love to see open <i>hardware</i>, if not just to give the kids a chance to understand the chips that run the software as well.

The monospace font just tops it off. Yeah, it does the job in principle, but it gets kids and parents wondering why it seems so removed from the &#x27;real world&#x27; (usually assumed to be represented by the parents&#x27; job environments, in most cases corporate office jobs).<p>I&#x27;d say, teach kids some actually foundational CS and IT basics (binary number conversion, imperative programming, OSI model,...), similar to how math is taught, maybe show them the basics of SSH connections, package managers, shell scripting,..., but don&#x27;t mix in tech discussions with other classes that are supposed to teach them language skills, geography knowledge,...

Truth is people don&#x27;t care what operating system they get as long as it &#x27;just works&#x27;. LibreOffice is IMO too ugly and unusable to use for tech illiterates.<p>Windows 10 and defender does a bloody good job of blocking lots of malware. Think of tools like mimikatz. You don&#x27;t see Ubuntu blocking a mimikatz-like binaries.<p>Firefox is slower compared to Chrome. People care about speed. Firefox is also not privacy friendly. Lots of telemetry to mozilla&#x2F;google.<p>You are out of touch and have embraced the cult that is Linux, Open Source. I don&#x27;t understand why the algorithm pushes your post to the top.

Not just that, but any software that is funded by government grants should be mandatory open-source, with some possibly some minimal exceptions for top-secret things like ICBM guidance systems.

The only compelling point was reducing hardware costs. Even then, it showed how out of touch this guy is.<p>Having a school system transition to raspberry pi’s sounds like a capped nightmare.

I need a term for this common conceptual error that I see folks in the software space make... One that I&#x27;ve made many times. It&#x27;s like the inverse of smartest person in the room syndrome... It&#x27;s the reasoning error where you believe that most people, or even the median person, is its competent at a skill you care passionately about as you are, because you&#x27;ve been doing it so long you forgotten how legitimately hard it is.<p>Most schools do not have the financial resources to hire a system administrator who can maintain an open-source architecture or the technical shops in house to maintain one themselves. From their point of view, the freedom and flexibility granted by an open source framework is a cost, not a benefit. It means there&#x27;s no right answer to how to do it, so when they screw up (and they inevitably will screw up regardless of what infrastructure they use), they don&#x27;t have a standard, closed source architecture to point to to shift blame.<p>From their point of view, closed source versus open source is irrelevant because the two are equivalently opaque to them.<p>Given all of that, there is probably meat on the bones for a company that chooses to use a fully open source stack to build solutions for schools, and the schools willing to invest in the resources to do the work in the house will be able to grow from that open source solution to when they maintain. But that does put the company who goes that road at the disadvantage of every customer being a potential competitor in the future...

An article from our state: “How switching to Linux-based free OS is saving Kerala govt schools Rs 3,000 crore.”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thenewsminute.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;how-switching-linux-based-free-os-saving-kerala-govt-schools-rs-3000-crore-101844" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thenewsminute.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;how-switching-linux-ba...</a>

I work in the UK post compulsory sector (18+ basic skills teaching, aka adult education, mostly maths), so not the primary age focus of the OA. A few reflections after the organisations I work for pivoted at a month&#x27;s notice to 100% online delivery:<p>Most of the students I see use their phones as the main Web access device (zoom online classes + video lessons + pdf files for documents and all). Touch screen&#x2F;direct manipulation UI is were it seems to be at. Students like <i>drawing</i> on my slides. I work with a teacher who makes extensive use of Google&#x27;s Jamboard (Please don&#x27;t cancel this project!!!) to check understanding. Each student in an online class of 10 can have a copy of a problem on their own page in Jamboard and show their working.<p>One of my employers IT dept (Microsoft shop all through, 1500+ client PCs) was happy to make OpenOffice(*)&#x2F;GIMP&#x2F;Inkscape available on the network. Students discovered the packages themselves and some used them without realising that they could have their own copies at home for nowt.<p>The other employer has gone Microsoft 365 total with Teams and all. The Web based office applications allow students to produce basic docs and keep the resulting files in their online storage. Few problems so far. Some integration with Moodle for course pages.<p>A large College locally uses Google Education to provide similar facilities. Students who take courses from both institutions seem to work well with the two different systems. I think people in these days of mobile devices are less dependent on one UI.<p>Addressing the OA&#x27;s main point: yes I think we could use more open source OS and applications in schools. Chromebooks are almost there when you think about it. BUT I suspect the future is Web apps. Contrast geogebra(1) with Logo(2) (and I think there is room for both)<p>(1) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geogebra.org&#x2F;calculator" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geogebra.org&#x2F;calculator</a><p>(2) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;el.media.mit.edu&#x2F;logo-foundation&#x2F;what_is_logo&#x2F;logo_programming.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;el.media.mit.edu&#x2F;logo-foundation&#x2F;what_is_logo&#x2F;logo_p...</a><p>Meta: I had to use links -dump <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tdarb.org&#x2F;posts&#x2F;schools.txt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tdarb.org&#x2F;posts&#x2F;schools.txt</a> | fmt | less<p>to read the OA. Lines just too long on graphical Web browser.

I&#x27;d love to agree with this but almost every experience I&#x27;ve had with an open source project that has a complex GUI has been painful. Tried to switch from Sheets to Libre Office Calc and it&#x27;s like going back to an incredibly buggy Excel, with a downgrade in UX&#x2F;UI.<p>PS. Why is this post a .txt file? I can&#x27;t even click the links.

Schools should use whatever is popular in the real world. Because that is what they will need to know when they graduate. And preparing for that is the whole point of School. Right now, that&#x27;s iOS and Windows.

Could be worth distinguishing between open source and free-to-use.<p>Something like VS Code works nicely but costs nothing.<p>If there&#x27;s a budget problem in schools there&#x27;s certainly software that can be used without paying for it.

I think this is so obvious that even Microsoft is wondering how they have pulled it of so long. Now to avoid people leaving Microsoft have included WSL and it works pretty well. Soon with GUI too…

Gotta love the authoritarianism of the open source evangelists.<p>&quot;Schools should only be allowed to use and teach with open source software.&quot;<p>So that&#x27;s be freedom for thee but not for me. Good to know.

Schools BY LAW <i>must</i> only use FLOSS run on their own iron or state-backed one, no single private company must be allowed for safety of students data. That&#x27;s is.

Schools should use software that works.

Everyone should be using open source.

&gt; A great deal of push-back comes from stubborn IT professionals[0] determined to keep things running on Windows - since this is mostly what they are familiar with.<p>No. The push back comes from management. In a university in Eastern europe (20 years ago) people were using what was available: unix on servers (sun, linux, BSD) and DOS and some windows 3.1 then 95 and NT on PCs. Windows was pirated like the majority of windows software. Then the law made SW piracy a felony. And as the law began to be enforced, MS came and made agreements with the university to distribute the MS software for free to students and to teach classes with Microsoft products. This was during the times when Linux was a &quot;cancer&quot; and &quot;communism&quot;. The IT professionals must dance as the management sings.

This article should have been written using HTML...

I helped introduce and support opensource software in corporate environments that are very intolerant of it. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I got it working ok but it is not for the faint of heart.<p>If you don&#x27;t have a team of skilled people who are willing and able to support OSS, then I firmly believe you shouldn&#x27;t be using it.<p>When I have critical bugs and outages I scramble to ask devs and OSS community for help. Sometimes I get help quick, other times it is months before anyone even has time to look at it. My priority is not mainatainers&#x27; priority. Not should it be. I have no feeling of entitlement to receive support&#x2F;help and I am totally grateful for any given.<p>Most HNers are devs&#x2F;swe and of the startup&#x2F;FAANG culture. In IT&#x2F;Ops at orgs that have tech only to support their main objectives, this is how a bug&#x2F;issue is handled: You get a ticket opened with the vendor and they fix it, maybe you get on a call with them asap. You have a need? If you pay them enough they will deliver. Is their product too hard to support? Or maybe it is just fine. IT folks bitch about it a bit and spend their time evaluating alternatives for the upcoming contract renewal. They don&#x27;t fork things or create PRs.<p>We use a product I won&#x27;t name from a FAANG and their support is like OSS support as is the UX of it. I can tolerate it but everyone else complain and struggle so much with it!<p>I had a critical feature needed for an OSS product, I searched and begged. Finally I forked an existing solution and got it to work (still works) but I can&#x27;t upstream my work because it is now deprecated and they decided to do things differently (but not complete enough to meet my needs). I had another critical issue that caused many problems. I opened issues and talked to the devs a lot, eventually a kind dev recently worked with me to get it fixed after many months. I am fine with it, knew what I was getting into and accept the state of OSS. But good luck finding people that will do this full time and meet uptime&#x2F;support SLA&#x2F;KPI. It can be done, I have worked at a tech company with an army of devs and engineers do wonders with OSS. But having woked in a small and big teams outside of tech... yeah..I stand by my sentiment about accepting the state and support cost of OSS upfront.<p>It is not OSS fault if you don&#x27;t understand what you are getting into beforehand. Some of my favorite OSS that I support have bad reputation which I have and still am trying to fight because people thought it would be like commercial enterprise software: Install and you are done. Have issues? Call support. Developer suddenly decides to something random that affects you? Complain and threaten with some legal b.s. , that won&#x27;t work in OSS. You need one or two people that are essentially contributing devs to the OSS software you plan on using.<p>It only harms OSS when you promote it without understanding the requirements of your target audience.

open source learning

This is dreadfully out of touch and only serves the interests of FOSS advocates, not the students. Give kids the tools that will make them successful in their educational and professional careers. Nobody is using GIMP in the graphic design world.

I live in the land of Raspberry Pi but the local school wants iPads and windows laptops. What can you do? A lot of people just aren&#x27;t interested in computers and if there&#x27;s one little disadvantage they are happy enough to not have anything. The stupid educational websites they like don&#x27;t all work perfectly with RPi so &quot;bzzzt&quot;. Next.