Gary Hepburn and Jan Buley‘s Innovate article (Getting Open Source Software into Schools:Strategies and Challenges) on open source is a pretty good read as it matched off and supports much of what I believe to be the issues involved with bringing any new systems into schools.
My position goes a little something like this… One of the things that people don’t really think about when it comes to Open Source is the cost. Yes, there is a cost to being free. Nothing comes for nothing you know. The costs involve having people trained to the point that they are willing and able to support software that has no other support, and often times, these people can get expensive. The benefits however can be great because there are many open source solutions that are very easy to support (FireFox/Thunderbird for example) and often these systems are far easier to customize than commercial applications often are. Even Linux variants like Unbuntu that may seem intimidating at first are easy to install and for common surf and turf computing, can be very inexpensive.
In my mind, a progressive administration would bring in Open Source and encourage the students to help support development of the tools and help with implementation if at all possible. There are likely several students in any given school that are more than up to the task and as long as they don’t have access to the production system, it could be an inexpensive means of developing open source solutions for a school.
The other cost, and this is one that I’m sensitive to in my position is that because Open Source is generally not as commonly used as commercial solutions so they don’t have that “sheep share” that makes many users more comfortable with a system. This also creates issues for admin as those responsible for implementing Open Source can often feel a considerable amount of push back from users with comments like “I don’t like it because nobody else is using this silly thing” … or “there is a reason that it’s free!”. This of course changes over time, but it never really ever goes away it seems.
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