Re:Is it really abhorrent? (Score 1)

I agree there is some foaming at the mouth going on here but I don't think it is all on the Windows front. I have been in tech side of the Education industry for the past 20 years. I have worked for a dealer, a school district and a major vendor.I have no personal stake in whether the schools run *nix, Windows or anything else but I can relate what I have seen. 1) Older hardware SHOULD be kept at their existing OS levels rather than trying to upgrade to XP. 2) Schools do not generally go out and buy new machines just to standardize on an OS. IF they have enough money they can sometimes see savings because they supporting a standard image is easier but that case has to be looked at carefully. 3) Implementing Linux is not a trivial task. You have to have complete buy-in from all of the stakeholders (Admin, IT, Principals, Teachers & even Parents). K-12 Schools are the most conservative places you will ever find. They don't like switching anything once they have it working. So you will find some major schools still running programs from Windows 3.1 days (No exageration here, I have seen this!). Many school servers have over 100 applications installed and getting them all too run on Windows is a difficult task, getting any significant proportion of them to run under WINE is impossible or prohibitavely difficult/time consuming. They also believe that every one of those apps is critical! 4) Many schools will only accept the apps they know because they have no $ to spend on letting their teachers retrain on new apps. Even the difference between Open Office and Word/Ms Office is huge for them and will often cause additional problems if they have to regularly exchange documents with a district office or Province/state Ministry of Education. 5) It is next to criminal to suggest that a school switch something as basic as their OS and their apps when the only person with any skills cannot devote any time to the matter. If they blindy accept the suggestion then they are in for a world of pain as they are forced to learn a totally different environment. It may seem odd to you folks but Teachers, in general, make very poor students and if there is a Union involved, watch out! 6) Is this school a private school or part of a district? If it is not a singleton school then there may not even be a choice. Most (if not all) districts specificly mandate the OS and apps that are to be on the computers in the schools. The school could potentially get into trouble with the district office by doing this. 7) Applications. There are a handful of little apps available under KDE, but how many are true educational applications? I am not talking about a generic astronomy program or a paint program. I am talking about programs that are designed to aid students in specific subjects, English, Math, Science. Most of those will be very difficult to implement in Wine as they make extensive use of Multi-media to help communicate ideas to the children. Sure if all that is being taught it how to type and how to draw simple squares and circles then it should be a snap, but in that scenario I doubt if those computers are making any real difference in those student's lives at all, anyway. I know I am going to get flamed for this but folks, really, I do have real-world experience here. I and others have looked exhaustively at how to implement a linux environment in a typical k-12 school and it just isn't there yet. The MS jugernaut (whether you like them or not) really does have the majority of what people want for their computers and they really don't want any inconveniences on the way. They want tools/appliances not challenges. Thanks.