More from ICE: Providing an Open Source Solution for School Wide Services

Sort of a group presentation for this one. Doug Pratt, Jim Kidston, and……?

Open Source protects the person using it from being accused of infringing on tellectual property, patents or copyrights.

Going through a brief history of Open Source, Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, etc… Point is, it’s not buggy software, fly by night, it’s well established and constantly improved upon.

Car analogy: WOuld you purchase a car with the hood sealed shut? The only way to service the car would be to take it to the manufacturer.

Nobody making money on Open Source, so there’s not a lot of advertising. How do schools find out about it?

Participating in OS (Open Source), you create a relationship with a global community rather than just a vendor. Online education communities: School Forge, K12 Linux Project, Squeak.

Why? Cost/license, quality, service, modularity, independence, community.
Why note? Cost/training, legacy issues, migration, specific applications, uncertain future.

Very low initial cost, some extra expenses in migration, but overall cost is less in the long run. According to software vendors, the cost ot support Open Source more than makes up for the initial buy in. I’d be curious to read more research on this.

Vendor Lock-in: Dependence on a specific program can lead to issues.

Open source has been around for 30 years, rapidly growing. major corporations are incorporating Open Source in their business plan. Sun comes to mind immediately because they recently made their operating system Open Source to try to generate more interest in it.

More interest in Open Source outside the United States than inside. Is this true outside of third world countries? Research?

Hmm… I wonder what program he’s using to do this presentation? Open Office or Microsoft Powerpoint?

How do you support Open Source? Little vendor support but many communities available. Seems to me that you basically have to fend for yourself. Definitely a valid concern.

Making the change to Open Source is low risk because cost of entry is practically non existent. Having students help out with it can ease transition.

Mozilla Compose, is that an alternative to Dreamweaver? Have to look into it.

Case Studies
Business Skills and Development Centre: Students were trained in Open Office and had no problem using Microsoft Office in the actual work environment. Their students also are more comfortable experimenting and ‘looking under the hood’ when things don’t work.

Canada: School in Saskatchewan, created Open Admin, used by most of the schools in the area.

Question: How many people actually “go under the hood” and tweak code if necessary? Not many, but they know where to find the resources they need to figure out issues and get things fixed. Perhaps they’re more adept with online networking?

District 45 in Dupage County uses Open Source almost exclusively. Have to drop them a line and see what resources they have.

IMSA (Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy): Lab school for grades 10-12 with 650 students. Why do students mess with Linux? Because they can! It’s easy to get at, it’s free, they can mess around with it. IMSA uses Samba for file sharing, Postfix for mail, Open Directory for LDAP, moving to Linux only server room.

There’s a great slide up right now that has a chart with non commerical versions of commercial software that they’re using. I’d love to take a photo of it, but I think that would be distracting. I’ll see if I can get a copy of the presentation to post a screenshot. They’re using FreeRadius for authorization, authentication and accounting. Didn’t know that it was that robust! They use tripwire, syslog and snort for security.

Bah, the battery is ticking down. I don’t expect to get too much more life out of it.

He’s pointing out that even though the software is free, and it’s usually easy to get it installed, there’s still a learning curve to deal with. Don’t expect it to be painless.

In response to a question about Open Office, he mentioned that the PowerPoint piece of it is probably the weakest component of the suite. I think that probably answers my earlier question.

DaVinci Academy: Has the students install Linux, download Apache, use Talk for chat. Sounds very experiential. Is planning on installing his own chat engine. Will be able to turn it off during school hours and then turn it on after hours.

Elgin Aacademy: (Note: Jim Kidston is doing the talk, very intelligent guy that I see often at the LMAIS meetings) Just put a Linux box in the server room. Playing around with it right now. Experimenting with Open Office, NView (?), (web page creation program), Moodle. Learning by jumping right in and seeing how it all works.

www.pjassociates.biz:
Sounds as though they’re basically willing to provide a computer to any school who wants to give it a shot. Very cool if that’s seriously what they’re offering.

Interesting.

Had a fantastic discussion with someone from DaVinci academy after the workshop. VERY cool stuff happening at that school. Think apache being set up by 6-8 graders.

1 Comment(s)

Jeff O'Hara
3/9/2005

We at d200 are linux completely on the web based side of things. Using it to power our webservers, dns, etc. It’s hard to get the boss to buy in to it for desktop situations, but we have used pdfcreator which is opensource in many instances. We always look at open source solutions prior to purchasing something to see if we can find something that will meet our needs for free.

Unfortunately, I did not make that session at ice.

-Jeff O’Hara
The iPodder Documentation Project
http://blog.zemote.com

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