[ubuntu-uk] ubunto in college, was Re: Women, LinuxWorld, Stuff

[Tony Arnold]

Matthew,

Matthew Saunders wrote:

> The College I work at is quite near Carolines (Essex).  We have
> started embracing open source as much as we can because the money
> isn't there to fund all this proprietary software.  I am deploying
> Linux as far as I can and I am succeeding with servers and kiosks, but
> I have a boundry that stops before the end user.  This is due to
> politics mainly and is a shame.  The argument is that the students
> should learn what is out there in industry, which is a valid point,
> but the value of open source is just as important.

The problem with this argument, is that the world stays with M$ forever 
because students coming out of Univeristies and college knwo M4 so that 
is what they use when they get to work and have no idea about anything else.

My University uses the same argument, at least for student outside 
Computer Science who are a special case:-) My argument is that 
Universities, at least, should be setting the standards and teaching 
things other than M$ so when they go out into the big wide world they 
can encourage employers to move to something other than M$

Having said all that, Linux needs to catch up on the applications front. 
The other reason we tend to deploy M$ everywhere is that we have 
thousands of applications available on our machines which would be very 
hard to find equivalents for all of those on Linux.

But then if my first argument was listened to the second point would no 
doubt solve itself, but it's a chicken an egg situation.

We do deploy Firefox asn alternative to IE and we also deploy 
StarOffice. I'm trying to get us to use OpenOffice instead.

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold