Re: [seul-edu] Re: Unified Front...

[Alan Chen <alan@digikata.com>]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2002 at 09:36:28AM -0700, tom poe wrote:
> On Thursday 25 April 2002 08:39, Michael Williams wrote:
> > > OK, I'm going to ask a simple question.  If we provided a ISO of the
> > > top N  educational apps, HOW-TOs, documentation, war stories, got
> > > permission to  distribute Star/Open Office, perhaps more, whatever
> > > (what I referred to  once as a package), would that be enough to get a
> > > district excited and  successful, or must we also include a Linux
> > > distro?
> >
> > Simple answer..NO
> >
> > Were is the training and support options? Those are the biggest obstacles
> > to overcome, desktop or server room. Mailing lists aren't enough. RTFM is
> > not enough. Unless you tie to a standard distro and provide scripts and
> > configurations that are pretty much canned your not going to win over the
> > majority of school systems.
> >
> > michael
> >
> > --
> > Michael Williams                   Instructional Technology
> > Haywood County Schools          216 Charles St. Clyde, NC 28721
> > http://www.k12linux.org                 (828) 627-8314
> 
> 
> Hi, Michael and others:  Training and support is a community-based effort.  
> Start with the ability to provide remote support on any setup, and, together 
> with local "hands and eyes", company IT depts, LUG's, Perl Users' Groups, and 
> others should provide ample support and training options across the country.  
> It's the design, and if it's the right model, everyone will be stepping up.  
> That's the advantage of developing through something like seul-edu.  A 
> central one-stop shop for educational hardware and software models.  I hope 
> the talented individuals on this list keep going, as I think we're close to 
> something, here.
> Thanks,,
> Tom Poe
> Reno, NV
> http://www.studioforrecording.org/
> http://www.ibiblio.org/studioforrecording/
> http://renotahoe.pm.org/
> 

I don't mean to discourage you, but the reality is that school
organizations require commercial support. Even if the software is free,
schools expect to have someone on a support contract who is required
to help fix any problems encounted.  Even with commercial support
services, my discussions with various school districts say that the
schools are leery of not having some sort of in-house expertise that
knows enough the take advantage of the commercial support. Everything
that we as free software advocates are promising to schools has been
promised, and broken, by proprietary vendors. We have an uphill battle.

There are companies trying to fight the commercial side of the battle
though, and the SEUL/edu and Schoolforge communities are a great
help. BlueLinux looks like it's coming along nicely.  I am hopeful for
the Open Source Phase II SBIR proposal that my company is putting
together for the US Dept. of Education. Microsoft and BSA are
"helping" with draconian licensing terms and audits.

Cheers,
- alan

-- 
Alan Chen
Digikata LLC
http://digikata.com