Re: [school-discuss] M$ Windows 7

[William Fragakis <william@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tim,
Respectfully, your comments make it appear that you are unaware of some
very powerful FOSS tools. I began using an excellent FOSS project,
k12ltsp, back in 2005 and it kicked the pants off anything that was
commercially available then or now. Our experience encouraged an entire
major metropolitan school district to move to FOSS computing for the
students because the upgrade costs otherwise would have broken the bank.

We paid nothing in licensing. We've upgraded software almost every year.
Upgrade licensing costs? Nothing. Why upgrade so frequently? We can give
our users the most current desktop  experience possible - from simple
things like multiple workspaces to the latest eye candy. 

We had so many software tools at our disposal for the first time,
teachers were almost in disbelief: language, math, science, geography,
graphic arts, etc. Even if Microsoft is making things cheaper for you,
you are still paying Adobe, etc. for their creativity programs and
others for things like typing tutors, and other educational software.
And, you are likely paying for antivirus (unless you are using something
like Clamwin, and how ironic it would be to use a FOSS tool to secure
Windows.) 

We've been able to manage, control and upgrade hundreds of desktops
painlessly and remotely. We only had to be physically there when
somebody kicked a connection loose. To assert that FOSS tools can't
control a desktop with a few mouse clicks, again, illustrates an
unawareness of FOSS tools. Please let me know an affordable alternative
to FL_TeacherTool, which can not only control, monitor and share
desktops but distribute documents, launch applications and log off
misbehaving students. A teacher can have every desktop in her/his
classroom launch a browser to a specific url with not much more than
typing 'firefox' and the address. What low cost Windows tool do you use
to do the same? 

To say, OO can't compete is silly in the education space. 1) It's a
recognized international (ISO) standard 2) I have yet to have a student
find an incompatibility or issue 3) As others mentioned, it's absolutely
cruel to give a student software at school that they can't afford at
home. 
In an evolving era of the networked desktop (ie Google Apps), thinking
that kids need to learn only Microsoft Office is very near-sighted. If
you don't believe me, think of how many jobs one can get these days by
being an expert in WordPerfect? Microsoft Word couldn't compete with it
up until the mid 90's. To paraphrase your comment: We can extend
OpenOffice to _every_ teacher, student and family - for free. 

Any techie worth his salary can write whatever scripting you may need.
I'm not a techie and I've scripted for both Linux and Windows. If your
techies can't script, I'd assert they aren't qualified. Why script? You
can do elegant things specifically for your needs. If you don't want to
script, there are tons of great GUI tools. We used WebAdmin, but there
are many others that allow computer, server and network administration
without the need for CLI. To use this argument to other system admins,
isn't - to say politely - very powerful. 

To claim that a Windows admin can manage more desktops than a Linux
admin isn't supported by either anecdote or independent research. (And I
stress the word independent, here.) 

If Microsoft is working for you, great. But many of your comments,
though well intentioned, simply do not reflect a) the experience of many
system administrators on this list and b) an accurate appraisal of FOSS
management tools.

Regards,
William Fragakis




On Tue, 2009-09-15 at 21:17 -0700, Tim Dressel wrote:
snip 
> To put things in perspective, we pay $14,000 per year in MS licensing.
> For this we get a site license of Office, Windows, Forefront, and
> every CAL under the sun. For us it works out to about $14/year per
> workstation. For this I have two full time techs that can completely
> hands off manage the entire network in 12 physical locations. Doing
> something similar in Linux land would take more bodies, but yes would
> be less expensive. I can extend WAHR to my teachers for Office 2007
> Enterprise for $16.25 delivered. OpenOffice just can't compete, and
> there is no combination of FLOSS tools that give me the same amount of
> control over my desktops with not much more than a few clicks of the
> mouse. I didn't have to write complex batch files, or perl myself
> silly.
> 
[snip] 
> Respectfully,
> 
> Tim
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Joel Kahn <jj2kk4@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Here's a recent article on the latest
> > fun & games from you-know-who:
> >more snip