Re: [school-discuss] Our District's Tech Conference

Ease of installation isn't typically an issue for me. A programmer can automate installation with a commercial product or an Open Source one. I know some of the technical specialists in our district just install everything once the way they want it and then make an image to copy to each machine out there. Doesn't matter if a program is commercial or Open Source with that technique. As a matter of fact, licensing is less of an issue with that type of distribution if you use Open Source. For me, maintenance is much, much easier if you have the source code. We have commercial products we use and pay the highest level for support. Most of the bugs we report are ignored and most of our support cases are closed without solving our issues. If I had the source code, I could fix the real problems and bugs and avoid coming up with inefficient work-arounds to every issue we hit. Reliability of a program is an important issue. You can find buggy or well-written commercial programs as well as Open Source ones. It's a matter of looking for what you want. What's key for me in Open Source is the ability to fix something if it's broken. Maybe the average school won't have the expertise to do that. However, if a company that makes an important piece of software that you need goes out of business, you're not stuck without support if you have the source code. Worse case scenario, you hire someone to fix it, if no one volunteers. If you check the camstudio site, you'll see that's exactly what's happened with that project. Also, wouldn't it make a great project for a class learning programming skills to help customize or work on Open Source software that their particular school or district needs?

I believe in the motto if you want something done right, you do it yourself. No company is going to take the time to customize a piece of software exactly the way I need it. That's something that only I'm going to do. You can pay consulting companies to customize software, but they're going to do what's good for them (usually what's easiest), not necessarily what's best for the client. I know that firsthand.

I feel strongly that quality of a piece of software is related to the designers/programmers involved, not to whether it is commercial or Open Source. You will find good and bad quality in both. There are commercial Open Source projects that have professional programmers working on them or that charge for software or support. The choice to go with Open Source depends entirely on the fact that you want the source code and you can make use of it in some way. The choice to go with Free/Libre software has to do with your rights to use the software, source code and related files and to modify (and distribute under the same license) any part of it as you see fit.

As to ease of doing this for a technical versus a non-technical person, I keep thinking of all the commercials on TV where they say, you wouldn't want some specialist doing your job, so why do his. To me, anyone who's truly interested in knowing how their computers or how programming languages work can learn. Anyone who isn't interested in any of this, really shouldn't be trying to set up techical installations or write programs. It's not something they want to be doing in the first place. If you combine people who have an interest in learning and solving the technical aspects with users who don't want to get involved in the technical but have a need and can suggest improvements, you have a winning combination. Usually (although not always) FLOSS is pretty good at the model.

On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 8:33 PM, Jim Jütte <jimjutte@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

For us here it is a question of dependability, ease of installation, maintenance and use... Not exactly a tall order, but if you think about what it would take for a non-technical person to do all of this with OS tools vs. Windows or Mac software... really not a competition. Unfortunately I can't really prove that either because when I think back to systems I am familiar with, the companies maintained them. I'm referring to hospital information management systems... pretty beefy software and hospitals either needed teams to run this and/or had the vendors provide support in addition to this.