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

[Alan Chen <alan@digikata.com>]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2002 at 01:14:52PM -0500, Kyle Hutson wrote:
> Minor correction - schools want it to work. This means either what
> you suggest (somebody on support contract) OR having in-house
> expertise (to which you allude below). When I spoke of Samba to my
> superintendent, I told him the biggest downside would be that if I
> left without training somebody else, it could be a headache - so he
> just told me to be sure my techs are trained. :-)

Good for you! :) Although I suspect that your school district is on
the leading edge of a wave of Open Source technology adoption in
education.

> 
> >                                      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.
> 
> Surely you have some company nearby that can handle this, if you
> can't yourself. I'm 1/2 hour from a "big town" (pop. 25,000) and
> they have 2 places that have linux specialists, and there are a
> couple more places that could do so with minimal effort. Heck, I was
> able to troubleshoot a network problem whilst attending a conference
> a few weeks ago, thanks to SSH on our web server.

Agreed, I am that company :).  But many of those companies are small
operations without the brand recognition of Microsoft.  


> >
> Everything
> > that we as free software advocates are promising to schools has
> been
> > promised, and broken, by proprietary vendors. We have an uphill
> battle.
> 
> ...which is exactly the strength of the free software movement. I
> can't make proprietary changes to GPL software and keep them to
> myself (at least, not once it's "distributed"). The freedom of
> information is what will keep vendors honest.

Exactly! My last few posts on this thread have been somewhat negative,
discussing some of the obstacles to the adoption of Open Source; but I
really do support Open Source in education.  Thats one of the primary
motivations for my quitting and working on my company exclusively.
Scary and exhilarating at the same time. :)


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