GL: Costs savings for schools switching to Open Source
Saving costs is a motive for schools to start using Open Source applications. Soon school kids in Japan and California will be using GNU/Linux and other Open Source software applications in class.
The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry announced plans for the migration early March at a conference on education. Some 400,000 PCs in Japan's schools are running outdated and unsupported operating systems. By switching to Open Source, the ministry aims to avoid having to replace both the PCs and invest in software licenses.
A teacher from a high-school in Fukuoka Prefecture, quoted in a news report by Gyaky, a volunteer-run media website: "Having to always install the latest software is costly, and it makes things very difficult for us. I want to move toward the use of free open-source software"
Savings are one of the motives for a migration in the Californian school district Windsor. Here about two thousand PCs now running Windows will soon be running the Suse Linux distribution. According to a news report on website Desktoplinux, the school IT administrator Heather Carver aims to cut costs, offer many more applications, and use less energy. The schools plans to use special software allowing applications that normally require the Windows OS to run on GNU/Linux. "It's the adults that tend to stay with what they're familiar with," added Carver. "This way, they can run their Windows apps as usual on the Linux OS, and everybody is happy."
Good grades
The pupils in Japan and California should have little trouble getting used to Open Source. In Turkey, several schools as well as the Computer Engineering labs at Canakkale 18 Mart University are using GNU/Linux and several Open Source applications. At the university, the PCs are diskless, with applications hosted on central servers, lowering maintenance costs and easing management. Another example can be found in Venlo, a city in the Netherlands. A school had 32 pupils test the use of OpenOffice running on Linux PCs for a week, two years ago. That combination got good grades. The school however, did not switch permanently. "It works well, but it was a just test."
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