Re: [school-discuss] Korea brings homegrown open source to schools

[Phil Carinhas <pac@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 04:36:55PM -0600, Alec Couros wrote:
> Steve Hargadon wrote:
> 
> >On 6/23/05, Daniel Howard <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> My only concern about instituting Linux into all these schools is that 
> you are mandating now what teachers are expected to use. 

 You mean like how MS is mandated in many schools?

>I think it's great that South Korea has gone ahead and discovered the
>economic and technical benefits of Linux, and I think this will be really
>interesting to see local support economies benefit from this as well.

 Poor school districts can barely afford software much less hardware. For
 them Linux and other free *nix systems makes a LOT of cents.

>Still, when technologies are mandated or institutionalized, innovation and
>flexibility can be be hindered.  What happens when the alternative becomes
>the mandated, dominant force and the ONLY choice?

 That is very unlikely to happen, at least with Linux and OSX. MS seems to
do a very good job of mandating with their incentive programs. I always
wonder why people make the arguments of FOSS mandating when MS has been
trying/doing that for a decade.

 -Phil
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