Free and Open Source Software
My favorite acronym of the day? FOSS. Free and Open Source Software. Via the Savvy Technologies, the Internation Open Source Network released a primer on FOSS in education. I haven’t read it yet, but I think this is an area that every Educational Technologist should be considering. In an era of budget cuts and increased emphasis on accountability, Open Source has tremendous potential for schools. Older hardware with Linux and internet access can be an extremely reasonable framework to build a technology program around. There’s an incredible amount of free material out there, and it’s only increasing.
1/25/2005
Amen. Wherever I work, I always try to turn my employers onto the beauty of open source. And, in education, I can’t understand why there exists such a slavish devotion to expensive proprietary software. It has its place, of course, and there are solutions for those who need to run a few closed-soruce apps. But why, for example, would you pay money to run IIS when Apache is free and better? For that matter, I’m eager to see some public schools shift to OpenOffice or finally make the jump to Linux on the desktop. We have a chance to help them understand the benefits. You can start simply: by running some OpenSource apps on Windows, for instance. Maybe Novel’s investment in Linux will help, since many public schools already have a relationship with that company. If budgests are tightening, that souldn’t just affect employee pay and benefits. It should drive change in other areas as well.
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is definitely a hot topic in education. I’ve written about it before and podcasted about it as well. When I went to the ICE […]
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