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[school-discuss] Looking back at Mexico's Red Escolar Libre...



Even in cases when a particular group of government bureaucrats is
sympathetic to FLOSS, for whatever grounds (cost-saving, security, code
access), its implementation can go wildly off target, as for example in the
case of the "Red Escolar Libre" (Free School Network) project in Mexican
Schools. (See "Mexican Schools Embrace Windows
<http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,45737,00.html>).^247
<#sdendnote247sym> In the year 2000, Mexico had 120,000 schools. In order to
achieve the goal of providing one computer lab consisting of 1 server and 6
desktops to all the 120,000 schools in Mexico, someone calculated that
instead of paying US$ 500 per server and US$ 55 per desktop license for
Windows, a Linux CD would save a lot of money. It would indeed have saved a
lot of money, but no proper plan was made to actually implement it in a
properly structured way and to make the labs work. A CD with Linux software
was shipped to the schools with the hope that it would simply be installed,
like a painting on a wall. Consequently, the plan looked good on paper, but
did not work. The problem here was not the software, but rather the
implementation of a plan. Based on the Mexican Red Escolar Libre project,
and learning from its mistakes, the Rede Escolar Livre RS project is
sponsored by the government of the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.
(Some more details of this project are given by Cesar Brod in the Latin
America Report in the appendix.) -- Niranjan Rajani, Finland... in his
report on FLOSS in the Developing Countries. 


[FOOTNOTE: The above is from the report  *Free as in Education.* 
Significance of the Free/Libre and Open Source Software for Developing
Countries, by the Helsinki-based researcher Niranjan Rajani niranjan dot 
rajani at maailma dot net undertaken in collaboration with
Juha Rekola and Timo Mielonen juha dot rekola at kepa dot fi - timo dot 
mielonen at maailma dot net for the Ministry for Foreign Affairs 
<http://formin.finland.fi/english/>  Finland with OneWorld Finland 
<http://www.maailma.net> and KEPA <http://www.kepa.fi/english/>.

As a pdf it is available at:
http://www.itfirms.co.za/research.html [? research.pdf ? --FN]

Will be shortly made available as html at:
http://fi.oneworld.net/article/view/56261
http://www.kepa.fi/english/