DoctorMo's Blog

I know what the first reaction will be to the news I hear on the grape vine that VT are pushing for Open Source. VT isn’t a normal state, the people there are much more sensible than the rest of the country. After all they elected Bernie Sanders, a self declared socialist as Senator.

But I’d argue that schools up and down the USA are much like each other, facing the same problems and generally with the same kinds of pressures from parents, teachers, government and big businesses. So to see Burlington School District issue this information (as part of a general update) on Open Source was surprising:

Open Source:
This year we are beginning our large-scale testing of open source software. Both the City Council and the School Board have requested this as part of ways to save costs. In addition to our web services, which have been running open source for several years, we have moved our main storage and printing systems to an open source operatins system. On all replacement computers we are using Open Office instead of Microsoft Office, and Open Office is available on all district computers. Although this is a small step, it represents a saving of 10% per new computer, or about $20,000 this year. In addition, Open Office is freely available to any home that wants it, so all of our students can have it, which is a saving of over $200 per copy for the parents. Of course, the savings would be irrelevant if the software wasn’t useful, but Open Office has virtually all of the functionality of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and can open any of those Microsoft files (even docx). Stay tuned for more information on using OpenOffice.

If we read this right it means there is real local government preference for Open Source. Now right now they’re going into because of costs instead of control, but I think a taste of freedom tends to stick around once you’ve deployed a FOSS solution and it’ll be more difficult for Microsoft or even IBM, Novell etc to get back in without offering serious concessions.

I also like that they are informing people that students can take advantage of OpenOffice, because it’s free too and supports all the same formats. That’s very good news as it’s an aspect of Free Software in schools which is often overlooked (that what is taught can be taken home without pressuring poor students to buy expensive software).

I’ll keep my ears open for any other news, because they are looking at a whole bunch of things as part of the review.