[ubuntu-uk] Opensource on BBC Technology

[Andy]

On 17/01/07, London School of Puppetry <lspinfo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Could someone outline for me the benefits of using OSS in schools and other
> publicly funded bodies- I feel in need of someone with knowledge to tell me,
> Caroline


I would expect the GNU guys to have a page about this on their
website, and here it is:
<http://www.gnu.org/education/education.html>

Some reasons off the top of my head:
1. Price (its often free of cost)

2. No single vendor lock in, Free Open Source software can be examined
and thus you can produce other compatible programs to read any files
you may have had.
You can also port them o different systems if you want.

3. Security. Schools hold sensitive information. If you use non-free
software you can not accurately determine what the program is doing,
it could be sending sensitive information back to its creator or could
have deliberate backdoors in it.
No-one but Microsoft knows if Windows contains such backdoors, but
there is more evidence to suggest it does have backdoors than evidence
to suggest it doesn't.

4. Ability to provide software to students, schools can allow students
to do work at home, such as writing essays, as long as they have a PC
if the school uses Free software then they can give out copies. This
allows poorer people to receive a better education, as much software
is now more expensive than the minimum hardware needed for a working
system.
(MS Office 2003, student version: £119.99 WinXP home SP2 £176.99
source Amazon.co.uk)
ArsTechnica budget box is $500, (roughly £250),
thus hardware cheaper than the MS OS and Office suite.
And that's not counting all the other software.
Or is it OK to require people to have money to get an education?

5. Ability to learn from the software.
All the source code is available. If a student asks 'how does this
program work', you can give them the source code to find out for
themselves.

6. Ability to adapt it to work with the schools system.

7. Ability to fix problems with the software if/when the vendor
refuses to (and yes vendors like Microsoft have refused to fix serious
security issues, let alone bugs)

8. Reassurance the program isn't going to suddenly stop being
maintained. If the company hat creates it folds another company can
work on it from where the dead company left off.

9. Effective use of British tax payers money. Should British tax payer
money be spent on strengthening a foreign monopoly? Surely it should
support British software companies. (And we all know that Canonical is
registered in the Isle of Man right?)

Also you may want to look at the Becta report.
<http://www.becta.org.uk/corporate/press_out.cfm?id=4681>

_ Andy