On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 3:17 PM, Anil Seth <seth.anil@...> wrote:
> On 16 November 2011 14:52, Dhaval Giani <dhaval.giani@...> wrote:
>
>> **
>>
>>
>> One of the things that came out is the amount of money they are
>> spending on the IT infrastructure, and most importantly licensing
>> costs. So, being the open source user I am, I suggested a move to
>> FOSS. My understanding is that generally the initial cost of a FOSS
>> setup is higher (training and so on), but one of my suggestions was to
>> have students maintain the labs and some sort of a best effort
>> maintenance. That is, get support only when the students cannot fix
>> it. The principal seemed quite interested by the idea and has given me
>> permission to setup one computer with Linux, so that they can see what
>> it is.
>>
>> I suspect the real challenge is not money or training but the mindset.
> Some teacher will have a powerpoint presentation with silly effects or
> fonts and will demonstrate that he/she can't use LibreOffice/OpenOffice.
>

ah, but that is where education comes in. Seriously, if that is going
to be the objection, then we really need better objections :-).

> And the admin will have tally or MS Access apps which can't run on Linux.
>

I am talking about the labs and so on. I would expect one or two
systems to still run windows or something, to run apps which are not
compatible or don't have an equivalent.

> However, if the license costs are hurting the management enough, then the
> management may be willing to take some risk.

I really hope that is not the reason for moving. The reason for moving
should be students. I can attribute my opportunities to just one
thing, having access to a computer where I could do whatever I wanted,
and satisfy my curiosity. With the world today, where everyone wants
an ipad or something, students are not really being encouraged to look
deeper, to check out the internals. The only chance they have is if
there is FOSS around. The place to target that is at the school level.
That should be the real motivation, not license costs. The license
costs should just be a good side effect :-)

Dhaval