Re:Bureaucratic Budget Law (Score 1)

OK, now that you've all had a chance to post your totally unfounded opinions of the ethics and intelligence of those of us who happen to ply our common trade in schools, can someone who's actually done the work weigh in? For the past 6 months I have been the network administrator of three schools which share a common campus. Between the three schools, there are 450 or so PCs, and we just this week added a second IT person, because we've ordered another hundred machines, and 550 is just a bit too much for one person to handle, and still keep tech support response time to same-day. Prior to this, the entire IT department of this campus consisted of me. I did the network administration, tne end user support, the applications development, integration, training, hardware troubleshooting and repair, the works. At the last job I held, for a non-profit corporation, we had a IT staff of three for 180 PCs doing much the same spectrum of tasks. If this shows you nothing else, I hope you uderstand that school IT budgets, compared to industry, are quite lean, at least around this region. We're always looking for ways to make our IT dollars go further, so believe me, if I thought there was a free or open source alternative that offered more value than a Microsoft one, I would certainly propose that we begin using it. Our network runs a mix of systems. There are 50 Macs or so, and all but one of the rest of the desktops run various flavors of Windows, from 95 up to XP. One desktop machine, one, runs Linux (happens to be Mandrake, because it's easy to set up and does what I want. I tried Debian, but until very recently, trying to get the version of CUPS that came with Debian to print to SMB printers was virtually impossible. Fortunately, there has been some good work recently on the testing distro.) I installed that one machine in the senior's lounge just to see if they'd use it. So far, they stick to the Windows machines and the one Mac in there. There are wonderful open source programs out there that I use virtually every day. I use Putty to log in to our linux web servers. I'll install the Gimp on this latest batch of laptops we're buying, because I don't have the funding to get Photoshop Elements licenses for them, and the choice is that, or no image editing software at all. I use FreeZip when I need to put a zip/unzip program on pre XP machines. But am I about to suggest we replace Windows with Linux desktops, Office with OpenOffice, or IE with Firefox? No way, at least not yet. Why? Lots of reasons. Here are some of them. Linux Desktops vs Windows: most of the kids have Windows at home, so it's a lot easier on them if the machines here use the same OS. Of course, our job isn't always to make their life easier, it's to educate them, so it could be argued we should expose them to another OS just so they will have to think about what an OS is really about, instead of just using one all the time, but that argument really doesn't hold much water with the language arts and social studies teachers, who don't care how much, or little, the kids understand about the computers they are using, they just want them to be able to do their research, mostly on the 'net, and write papers and prepare presentations. Another point: I support machines as much as 8-10 years old now, pentium 133s with 32 meg of RAM running windows 95. (So much for the bloated budgets of bureaucracy some /. readers seem to think exist, huh?) We can hardly run Linux/OpenOffice on these, now, can we? so running Linux on some machines would require the kids to use one GUI on some machines, and another on others, and require me, the sysadmin, to worry about how to integrate all these into one seamless, easy to use and maintain, network infrastructure. Believe me, if I had the time, I would enjoy the challenge. But I simply don't have the time. If I were putting together a network from scratch, I might be tempted to avoid using Windows at all, to avoid headaches like virus threats that are the bane of any Windows network administrator's life, and use a more secure OS. This is not the case, however. Also, just as there are legacy machines, there are legacy applications that are Windows apps, which must be supported. It's all well and good to say there are Linux apps that are equivalent to the student records databases in use around here, but the fact is that we've used the ones we do for years, and these are so integrated into the workflow of the administration that to change them would be a very expensive proposition for training and business process reengineering, even if the program we were adopting was free. I could go on with a whole host of other reasons why Linux on the desktop would be a very hard sell around here, but I hope you get the idea. When you look at all the costs associated with a choice of OS, and not just the licensing costs, Linux on the desktop wouldn't be a very good value for us at this point. Windows 200x server vs Linux servers - we do use linux as web servers, but first of all, when you're a school, licensing Windows file server software products is dirt cheap (something like $80 for a server license, and $5/workstation for client access licenses), and Samba doesn't have anything even close to Active Directory group policies for managing newer Windows desktops. One sad fact is that in a school environment, there are kids who enjoy nothing more than trashing the settings of a Windows machine, making it difficult or impossible for the next kid to use, and group policies can prevent some of that. To be honest, I haven't implemented these policies yet to the extent that I would like, but I'm getting there. Once again, when you look beyond the license fees to the entire cost of ownership of the competing solutions, Windows wins. (PS. It pains me to say this. I like Linux, I use it whenever I do think it's the best value, including running the PC in my own living room on it, and running my home web/file server on it. But for the school, we need Windows.) Ie vs Firefox - Firefox is hands down a betther browser than IE, in my opinion. Tabbed browsing alone is enough to tip the balance in FF's favor, to me. But have I installed it on many machines on campus? no. I have installed it in my computer lab, and there uncovered one fatal flaw. On these machines I have set up policies to keep kids from changing the Windows wallpaper, because some of them are fond of going to sites like Google images, searching for inappopriate images, and making those their wallpaper. (Yes, we have content filtering on our internet connection. It's not perfect.) On these machines, in IE, if you right click on an image, click set as wallpaper, IE will tell you sorry, the administrator has restricted your ability to do that. In Firefox, if you do the same thing, it works. In other words, Firefox ignores the policy. Now, you could argue that this is really Microsoft's fault, that their policies mechanism ought to lock the OS in a way that an app can't ignore, and I would agree with that. But this argument doesn't get us any closer to keeping kids from doing things they shouldn't. So for now, I'll stick with IE on most machines, even if FF is faster and easier to use. Office vs OpenOffice - Office costs this campus about $20/workstation/year to license. It's one of the biggest software support checks we write every year. Would I like to save that money? you bet. But is OpenOffice, or any other free suite, ready to replace Office? Nope, not that I've seen. I use OpenOffice at home, I have for some time. For most basic uses, it's fine. But use it for more advanced tasks, and sooner or later, it will frustrate you to no end. Printing in OpenOffice Calc has been one such source of frustration for me. I have a spreadsheet I use at home to do some financial work for my church, and it works just fine, until you go to print. Then, I can't get pages to fit to one page automatically the way Excel does so easily. It just doesn't work. Another spreadsheet I built a couple of years ago wouldn't print the grid lines. In both cases, I've saved these spreadsheets in excel format, taken them to a machine that does have Excel, and accomplished what I wanted in minutes. So sorry, IMO, OO isn't ready for a world of semi computer literate, impatient users, it's only ready for those of us who are willing to cut it a little slack because we're rooting for the little guy, or who are unwilling to shell out the money for an Office license. One day, I hope to stop writing those big software license checks. But that day has not yet arrived. Whew, this has been a long post. What's my point? I guess my point is, that old native american adage about not judging others 'till you have walked a mile in their moccasins ought to apply to those of you who have posted grossly uninformed opinions of those of us who make IT decisions for schools. If and when we refuse to adopt open source products, we don't do it because we're lazy, or stupid, or corrupt, or lack the courage to innovate. We do it because the products haven't yet made a sufficiently strong case that they are a better value proposition than what we're currently using. When that happens, we will adopt them.