Convincing a school district to migrate from OS X to Ubuntu or Edubuntu

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Mon, 17 Nov 2008, David McNally wrote:

> Please let me know what you think.

Being realistic for a moment, I think you need to consider what the huge
changes you propose that all your technicians and users would have to make,
what the real benefit would be to those users and what problems it might
cause.  In other words a realistic cost:benefit analysis.

You dislike Microsoft Office.  One person's preference is a dubious reason
for an entire network to change, but the targetted solution would be to
propose replacing Microsoft Office with something like OpenOffice v3 (for
OS X).

You're apparently worried about virus issues.  There are few, if any, virus
problems at all on OS X to date so moving to linux is unlikely to help here.

My advice is only to suggest replacing an operating system (a massively
expensive task across a network) where you can document real, compelling
benefits which that change will bring and where those benefits outweigh the
potential downsides.  Otherwise, you probably won't convince them of
anything and if you do, you may be in for a horrible shock when your wish
comes true.

There are often compelling reasons (license costs, hardware costs,
maintainability, flexibility, ...), but you haven't listed any that I can
see as yet.

I use linux and help support it in a school, but one should not recommend
changing a school's working system without a substantial amount of careful
thought and certainty that it will work out well.  If it doesn't, you'll be
responsible.

Gavin