Comment Perspective from a student and a US citizen. (Score 1) 347
I commend the initiative by Red Hat and the decision by the staff of Parrs Wood on this matter. For those reasons I sort of wish I were going to high school in the United Kingdom rather than high school "X" (name withheld).
I feel the most interesting thing about this is not that RedHat is giving it away for free (well duh), or that tech support is discounted, but that the school actually accepted it. That's absolutely astonishing to me, and I seriously doubt that X High School would ever go for that.
Why? Oh, not because Linux is not a stable operating system, not because Linux is not supported on the hardware (I've already proven that it is on one box...), but because people just don't get it. They don't understand anything that's not Windows, and for the most part, not even that (our NT SA has never installed NT). Last year some students (working for the school as System Administrators) had set up a webserver, mailserver, and some other fun goodies mostly running RedHat on Sparcs. If I recall correctly, my friend said a man from the Central Office FORCED them to take them down. His major complaints were that it was unstable and insecure (simultaneously I thought about a bug report I had seen on a buffer overflow exploit for Microsoft Internet Information Server... oh and my friends soon quit that bummer of a job). And to think... once upon a time there was going to be a massive sun server powering little terminals throughout the building. Just last year we were promised several SGI boxes at nearly 50% discounts and full support, only to find that the CompSci department turned them down in favor of a bunch of G3s to do the video editing on! The SGI demo was the first place I had ever seen any time of UNIX demonstrated (and I drooled over the hotswappable harddrives and simply that case), but of course, the department didn't understand the value of such machines and how much we would have learned from using something other than a Mac.
I think it's wonderful that schools in the United Kingdom are going to be getting a flavor (or rather, flavour) of UNIX to play with. Those kids are in for quite a learning experience and, judging by the marketplace today, an incredibly valuable experience too. I was definately born in the wrong country. I'd be overjoyed to see something like this in my school. I wonder how it is in other schools in the US...
I feel the most interesting thing about this is not that RedHat is giving it away for free (well duh), or that tech support is discounted, but that the school actually accepted it. That's absolutely astonishing to me, and I seriously doubt that X High School would ever go for that.
Why? Oh, not because Linux is not a stable operating system, not because Linux is not supported on the hardware (I've already proven that it is on one box...), but because people just don't get it. They don't understand anything that's not Windows, and for the most part, not even that (our NT SA has never installed NT). Last year some students (working for the school as System Administrators) had set up a webserver, mailserver, and some other fun goodies mostly running RedHat on Sparcs. If I recall correctly, my friend said a man from the Central Office FORCED them to take them down. His major complaints were that it was unstable and insecure (simultaneously I thought about a bug report I had seen on a buffer overflow exploit for Microsoft Internet Information Server... oh and my friends soon quit that bummer of a job). And to think... once upon a time there was going to be a massive sun server powering little terminals throughout the building. Just last year we were promised several SGI boxes at nearly 50% discounts and full support, only to find that the CompSci department turned them down in favor of a bunch of G3s to do the video editing on! The SGI demo was the first place I had ever seen any time of UNIX demonstrated (and I drooled over the hotswappable harddrives and simply that case), but of course, the department didn't understand the value of such machines and how much we would have learned from using something other than a Mac.
I think it's wonderful that schools in the United Kingdom are going to be getting a flavor (or rather, flavour) of UNIX to play with. Those kids are in for quite a learning experience and, judging by the marketplace today, an incredibly valuable experience too. I was definately born in the wrong country. I'd be overjoyed to see something like this in my school. I wonder how it is in other schools in the US...
