Re: [seul-edu] Re: [school-discuss] our saga continues in jefferson parish

[Leon Brooks <leon@brooks.fdns.net>]

On Wed, 14 Aug 2002 21:37, tompoe@renonevada.net wrote:
> Therefore, since the first year's savings was so little,
> therefore, the switch would be what, too costly?  That's weird logic.

No, if there is simply not enough cash around to immediately cover the 
changeover costs, it can't be done unless a gradual solution is possible.

The way Select and similar Microsoft entrapment^[^Hlicencing works, changing 
over *some* of your systems won't save any money until a large proportion of 
them have been changed. I firmly believe that his is one of the core design 
features of Select et al. What this means in practical terms is that you 
continue to bleed licencing money *and* changeover costs until the changeover 
is past breakeven point.

Even if the district had a passel of volunteers to upgrade (say) the 60-80% of 
workstations which do not have to run Borged and unWINEable applications and 
also do followup support, the school still has to cope with the cost 
speedbump of teachers and students coming to terms with the new system. For 
Office type stuff (except a few major items like MS-Publisher, MS-Frontpage, 
MS-Access) the speedbump is very small. For educational apps it may be very 
significant, involving redesigning course materials or even whole courses. No 
computer is an island.

If I were in charge of such a project, I would immediately review every class 
in the district, change the workstations not using Borg-trapped apps ASAP 
(borrow as many volunteers as I could) a classroom at a time, and as many 
servers as I could (ie gateways, fileservers, PDCs and the like). While the 
subsequent speedbump was happening I'd be trialling replacements for the 
remaining apps and services. By this time, the more-expensive-per-seat 
licencing on the fewer machines would hopefully be hitting something like 
breakeven.

In the process, I would expect to consolidate some servers. This will be 
important for LTSPing classrooms in order to be able to recycle older, lower 
performance hardware, which would in turn free up higher performance machines 
for improving key workstations and/or conversion to servers themselves.

When the speedbump from this subsided, I'd start classroom-at-a-time 
application deBorgment, the idea being that as each specialised app was 
replaced, I would pause to iron out the major bugs/deficiencies before doing 
the next one. Where possible, I'd choose portable replacements, and replace 
the apps _on_Windows_ until there was nothing important left, then convert 
the classroom, hopefully to LTSP in most cases.

I would expect not to convert all of the workstations because there are a few 
applications which will not yet run under WINE, Win4Lin or VMWare, and have 
no direct equivalents. I would also expect to retain *some* Win4Lin sessions 
with attendant Borg licences for a very long time.

As part of the conversion, I would be constantly searching for free-and-Free 
apps (like The Gimp to replace PhotoShop) to introduce, constantly getting 
the students and staff involved in managing the system as much as possible, 
and regularly sending home CDs with the students, each CD with a new round of 
free-and-Free apps that are available for both Windows and Linux. The CDs 
that went home would include games as `bait' for both parents and children.

As things progressed, I would offer classes in Linux, start student LUGs, and 
as far as possible send Linux home with the kids as well and make it as 
attractive as possible (e.g. provide indials for staff and students but 
savagely restrict what they can do unless the calling machine was not 
Windows).

I would also have an unofficial Student Penguinista scoreboard for machines 
converted to Linux and machines still using Linux after 1/3/12 months with 
annual prizes, and regular competitions to see who could produce the best 
work with a specific app (e.g. The Gimp again, entries must be submitted as 
unflattened XCF files to prevent cheating). Selected older students would be 
deliberately groomed for IT jobs.

However, you would have to spend some money to save some money. In short, they 
should have started last year.

Cheers; Leon