Re: [seul-edu] Re: Unified Front...

["Kyle Hutson" <smyle@rockcreek.k12.ks.us>]

On 25 Apr 2002 at 10:49, Alan Chen wrote:
> I don't mean to discourage you, but the reality is that school
> organizations require commercial support. Even if the software is
free,
> schools expect to have someone on a support contract who is
required
> to help fix any problems encounted.

Minor correction - schools want it to work. This means either what
you suggest (somebody on support contract) OR having in-house
expertise (to which you allude below). When I spoke of Samba to my
superintendent, I told him the biggest downside would be that if I
left without training somebody else, it could be a headache - so he
just told me to be sure my techs are trained. :-)

>                                      Even with commercial support
> services, my discussions with various school districts say that
the
> schools are leery of not having some sort of in-house expertise
that
> knows enough the take advantage of the commercial support.

Surely you have some company nearby that can handle this, if you
can't yourself. I'm 1/2 hour from a "big town" (pop. 25,000) and
they have 2 places that have linux specialists, and there are a
couple more places that could do so with minimal effort. Heck, I was
able to troubleshoot a network problem whilst attending a conference
a few weeks ago, thanks to SSH on our web server.

>
Everything
> that we as free software advocates are promising to schools has
been
> promised, and broken, by proprietary vendors. We have an uphill
battle.

...which is exactly the strength of the free software movement. I
can't make proprietary changes to GPL software and keep them to
myself (at least, not once it's "distributed"). The freedom of
information is what will keep vendors honest.

--
Kyle Hutson /  Director of Technology  / Rock Creek Schools:  USD323

smyle@rockcreekschools.org                              785-494-8591

Actually I am a laboratory mouse posing as an engineer as part of an

               elaborate plot to take over the world