Ubuntu and Education : The good, the bad and the ugly.

[Stuart Ellis]

Hi,

Apologies in advance if this mail breaks threading...

Here are few experiences from working as an administrator in education.
Hopefully it's not too long and indigestible :).

The Good:

* Knoppix: Windows is very fragile and prone to breaking in complicated
ways. LiveCDs enable us to boot any machine with a fully functional
network operating system in less than a couple of minutes. They also
give us a priceless insurance policy: as long as data still exists on a
machine's hard drive we can probably retrieve it, so matter how badly
the installed operating system is wrecked.

* The absence of licensing paperwork: It may sound trivial, but this has
reduced deployment times and stress whenever we use open source
software, and is a breath of fresh air. Although we can obtain extremely
cheap academic licenses for proprietary software the business licencing
causes internal friction and significant work.

Managing proprietary licencing feels a lot like being an unpaid tax
collector for the software vendors. Using an open source product lets us
stop having to say "No, not until somebody signs another cheque from
their budget, per the multiple emails about this" to staff who have more
important things to worry about, and get on with solving their problems.

To explain - our non-technical decision-makers often dislike being asked
to sign more than one cheque for the same thing, especially when they
get nothing tangible for it, and academic licences usually only cover a
specific number of machines for a specific version of the product. So to
maintain availability of a proprietary application we often have keep
going back and pestering to get more licenses, then spend more time
getting paperwork from resellers, and then updating the records that we
must keep in case of an audit. A standard Windows system with
applications will involve a bare minimum of four different paid-for
licences from two vendors, and it's usually more.

The Bad:

* The absence of consistent task-based interfaces for common management
chores: Most of the technical folks (IT teachers, developers, and
support professionals) that I deal with enjoy mastering one or two
technologies that are of particular interest to them, and for everything
else they want a clearly defined set of steps to get the job done.

The weakest spot of all is probably utilities for managing hardware
features on Linux. The engineers that come in to service our warrantied
hardware have their own (graphical Windows) utilities for things like
rebuilding RAID arrays, and have no interest in learning the muddle of
Linux diagnostic utilities.

The Ugly:

* Every development team builds applications their own way, and most do
it wrong: Every administrator can probably tell lots of stories about
expensive specialist applications from big names that have obvious and
basic errors in how they have been constructed...

Over the past few years the really specialised and critical applications
that we handle have largely moved to being server-based with Web
interfaces. Unfortunately these are often built for Windows servers, and
the Web interfaces are not compatible with open source browsers. Issues
include IE-specific code, ActiveX controls, assuming the Microsoft VM
rather than a standards-compliant Java run-time, and dependencies on
specialised proprietary plug-ins.

I suppose the lesson is that many developers aren't exactly sure how to
build and test standards-compliant Web applications... Perhaps Ubuntu
could do a lot here by promoting one of the new Web application
frameworks, and publishing some material about best practises in
building and testing Web applications, so that developers can avoid the
traps that make their applications effectively Windows-only.

Cheers

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