How Microsoft Beats GNU/Linux In Schools 476
twitter writes "Ever wonder why schools still use Windows? Boycott Novell has extracted the details from 2002 Microsoft email presented in the Comes vrs Microsoft case and other leaks. What emerges is Microsoft's desperate battle to 'never lose to Linux.' At stake for Microsoft is more than a billion dollars of annual revenue, vital user conditioning and governmental lock in that excludes competition, and software freedom for the rest of us. Education and Government Incentives [EDGI] and "Microsoft Unlimited Potential" are programs that allows vendors to sell Windows at zero cost. Microsoft's nightmare scenario has already been realized in Indiana and other places. Windows is not really competitive and schools that switch save tens of millions of dollars. Because software is about as expensive as the hardware in these deals, the world could save up to $500 million each year by dumping Microsoft. Now that the cat is out of the bag, it's hard to see what Microsoft can do other than what they did to Peter Quinn."
Den of paranoia? (Score:1, Informative)
Some people think so [linux.com]. Paranoia is what leads to things like these [boycottnovell.com] (make sure you read the comments there), and makes that blog a rather annoying cesspool which occasionally plops out a useful bit of information.
Stay away from extremists, and get your news from people other than Slashdot's resident joke [slashdot.org].
And kudos to ScuttleMonkey, who had to remove all the creative spelling and grammar errors from the submission.
Apps! (Score:5, Informative)
Most educational software simply isn't written for Linux. Most educational software is poorly written for Windows. Running as a non-admin user is always a hangup. I can't imagine trying to get all these apps to run under Wine. The chorus of "why don't we have windows" would be deafening.
The reason Windows beats Linux in schools is because the apps they need, work under windows. When the superintendent wants an application, he gets it. No matter how poorly written or insecure it is, we always end up installing it. If linux is somehow responsible for it not working, linux gets tossed, 100% of the time.
Re:Can anyone explain the link? (Score:5, Informative)
A couple of years back, Massachusetts attempted to mandate open formats in state government. ODF was to be the office piece of this and MS pulled every dirty trick in the book to reverse or subvert that up to and including pulling strings to get the people pushing for this pressured to leave.
I suggest "massachusetts odf" as better set of search terms for Google.
90%+ of a market is a monopoly (Score:3, Informative)
Hell even 50%+ is considered a monopoly for all intents and purposes in most jurisdictions.
Re:Product dumping (Score:4, Informative)
>>School systems are one of the most budget limited govt run orgs.
This is true, but there are often a lot of state or national funds available specifically for technology that don't come out of the school's (local) budget. So there are actually a lot of public schools that have more money than they really need sloshing around for computers, even if they're scrambling to pay their teachers and replace horrendously outdated textbooks.
More Microsoft is Doomed Retric (Score:4, Informative)
Now that the cat is out of the bag, it's hard to see what Microsoft can do other than what they did to ...
I like Linux as much as the next guy ( I run it almost exclusively) But seriously how many times do I have to read M$ is doomed! DOOOMMED!
Windows is popular in schools (as is mac) because the experience is more seamless then it is in a flavour of Linux. Schools are not trying to just teach computers to kids, their trying to get them to read, write, perform arithmetical, or other tasks that are SEEN as separate from the computing experience. As soon as you have to explain to teaching staff that Gnome isn't Linux isn't GNU isn't RedHat ... you've lost the case because the teachers are just going to say "This isn't a computer class! Why do I have to learn this!?"
I think Linux would be great is schools but until you have a reasonably seamless experience your not going to get anywhere.
The arguments always come down to cost: "Linux will save you money". Sure it will. But these institutions are used to spending money to get what they think they need. Your not going to win this argument with cost benefits alone, you have to convince them that Linux will do a better job then Windows and Mac and as of right now I don't think that's an easy case to make.
twitter == BoycottNovell Shill (Score:4, Informative)
Check his posting history (with all his 40 sock accounts), the guy does nothing but paste links to that blog. Recent example [slashdot.org]. Look at his comments, submissions and journal entries. Aside from "M$" what you'll see are links to that blog. And surprise, it's AdSense-enabled!
I think someone just figured out:
Lame, lame lame.
Re:Product dumping (Score:2, Informative)
RTFHeadline.
Re:Apps! (Score:5, Informative)
When an application crashes under Windows, the application failed. When an application crashes under Linux, Linux fails.
I may sound pompous, but the first bias is being fought by using techniques that could be used in the second as well. The most simple method that yields results is incredibly cheap : show people they have a bias. Most people don't like to feel that they are being sexist and try to correct their bias if they perceive it. Most people (especially teacher, where I live) don't like to feel they are doing the job of a corporate lackey, or helping a monopoly. Microsoft does have a bad rep, not only among geeks. People also don't like to feel that they are being cheated in paying too much for so few.
That, and I was really impressed by wine progresses (under the standard Ubuntu install) these years. Most of your old Windows applications will work better under Ubuntu than under Vista. Even file sharing through netbios/samba worked more easily.
Re:Product dumping (Score:3, Informative)
Unbiased from someone named 'AppleOSux'. Allthough I use linux at home and personally think it's better on price and technical merit than windows or OS X, Apple wins at schools for the same reason schools use windows. OS X runs photoshop students use in photo class, it runs MS Office that everyone has their documents in (and before you say OO, our school switched to office 07 this year and OO has had problems on at least half of the documents, allthough usually its just formatting problems and you can still read it). Our school is about half macs right now. They decide the OS based on the applications. OS X runs office, photoshop, eclipse, audacity (I know those last two are cross platform/OSS), and the rest of the software they need, except for the teachers grading software that runs on windows, which is why every classroom has one windows comp in it.
rear guard action (Score:3, Informative)
Look at what's happening across the world:
http://knowledge.oscc.org.my/newsletters/first-quarterly-e-newsletter-jan-2009/at_download/file [oscc.org.my]
the government's documented savings is US$10mil last year. And there are numerous undocumented savings, as well as followons, schools are now putting OSS in, etc etc.
Re:Product dumping (Score:4, Informative)
I can only speak of the situation here in Germany, but throughout my whole education so far, including several terms in computer science, I have encountered exactly 1 (read: one) Mac in a publicly-funded institution, and that one was located in the arts faculty of my grammar school. Over here Macs are very much limited to visual arts faculties and (usually private) specialised arts and design academies, and even there they hold no monopoly.
Is the situation in other countries that different?
Re:Product dumping (Score:3, Informative)
Linux might make headway for that cost reason now that we're in economic downturn, but right now Mac has over three times the users.
Linux began making headway long before the economy went South. The value proposition of low, or no acquisition cost is just icing on already very appealing cake.
As far number of users, I have heard OS/X has anywhere from six to ten percent of the *OS market* depending on which survey you happen to believe. I would say its not hard to believe that market use of Linux/BSD on the desktop rival this at least.
Honestly I am not sure how people are counting number of Linux/BSD desktop/laptop users since there is no license to buy. You download, then go using one copy of a download to install numerous times/instances. For all either us know there could be many, many millions of users.
Mac OSX is a very small part of the cost of a Mac. And all the major desktop GNU/Linux apps run on Mac OSX
According to the Apple site, a copy of Leopard costs $129. Not exactly trivial. though I am not sure what percentage of the cost of a new Mac is the OS.
I have no problem with Macs, or OS/X but for my money I can get a lot more value through commodity hardware coupled with Linux, or FreeBSD.
Many folks are discovering the same.
Re:Dumping. (Score:2, Informative)
The majority of *market domincance* surveys boil to little more than highly slanted, carefully filtered marketing campaigns. Given that, why do you feel anecdotal experience is essentially worthless?
I have worked for many companies, I have seen a tremendous amount of Linux/BSD on the back-end, and now I am seeing it on the client-side as well.
None of the organizations for which I have worked have been ten person shops but rather larger enterprises looking to maximize their investment in infrastructure from initial purchase to full depreciation. All of them recognized open source as a viable means of achieving these goals in some form or another.
Re:Dumping. (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe they (or their resume) tells you that to get the job? I'm not doubting their Linux/BSD skills, but people tailor their resumes to the specific job they are applying for.
I am sure they did tailor their resume, that is exactly what people interested in getting a job do!
The fact is they landed the position because when we interviewed them they demonstrated strong Linux/UNIX skills.
I work with these folks daily, as they continue to demonstrate strong Linux/UNIX skills, and knowledge.
rambling comments from a labtech... (Score:5, Informative)
I made the switch to Linux with Ubuntu because, for most things, it works just plain better than Windows. But, getting this point across to the people I work with is, well, proving rather difficult.
Why is that? Because:
1) People are gullible. The people that make decisions about purchasing first look at a glossy sales brochure or pick what they saw advertised on TV. Then they then ask "Is this okay?" Linux doesn't have any shiny brochures, we never get asked if it's okay.
2) People are terrified of change, any change. They won't admit it, but they are. It's not that Linux is still harder to use than Windows (honestly, it's the other way around now, and I've proved it to people); it's that people don't want to change, even for the better.
3) People are lazy. I had instructors DEMANDING that I dual-boot to Linux (so I used a VMware image instead) and then they went off to teach MS Office instead of Open-Office... because there's a course-pack/textbook that includes online testing and grading (so they don't have to do any work).
In short, the problem is inertia. Unfortunately, Linux is going to have to get way better than Windows before the Educational "ship" can start to make some course corrections. Dumb, fearful, lazy people have to be beaten over the head with the obvious before they will change direction.
Now, the appropriate tool to beat said people over the head with is a turn-key Linux distribution that integrates into an Active Directory domain, right out of the box. One that includes an image-casting process that allows 100s of computers to be managed (deployed, updated, etc.) from a central console (PXE boot, the works). If I had that (turn-key), I might make some progress around here... though it would still take a while.
FOSS will eventually dominate education. It is inevitable. The Linux distributions out there are making phenomenal strides towards ease-of-use and overall functionality. In most aspects, they have already bested Windows. But, it will take time to overcome the inertia in Education. Honestly, I expect the business world will actually turn first. Education, despite its best efforts, is surprisingly conservative.
David...
Re:Product dumping (Score:4, Informative)
True for the "enterprise" versions, which usually are supposed to include some support. But it is legal to use a free Linux distribution (even if not promoted for organizations by the Linux vendor).
CentOS is even advertised as being identical to RedHat except for the name, and free for download.
There is your free competition ;-)
Choosing Apple for Education - nobrainer (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Apps! (Score:3, Informative)
It's that users don't want to have to fuck around with shit to make it work.
I didn't *have* to fuck around with anything to get Mplayer, Thunderbird, and Pidgin installed and running. I said "Package Manager, make it so! (and install all the eeeevil codecs, while you're at it)". ;)
I agree that mplayer's frontend sucks. But, have you used Amarok? I have. It's pretty fucking awsome. It claims to have iPod (and other music device) support, but I don't have any such devices to test that claim. IMO, Amarok's waaaaay better than iTunes, and -as a music player and organizer- parsecs beyond WMP. I simply asked my package manager to install that one, too.
And gnomemeeting? I'm thinking you don't actually use it,
You caught me. :/ *has no reason to be videoconferencing.* I don't have a webcam, but did have Ekiga installed -for some damn reason-, so I ran the "Configuration Druid" and accepted the defaults at every page. It ended up autodetected my sound hardware and my NAT, and then enabled STUN.
I then called sip:500@ekiga.net as suggested here [ekiga.org], and heard my voice! I called sip:520@ekiga.net as suggested here [ekiga.net] and found out that I could, indeed be reached from the outside world. I even had a friend call me from his Asterisk site. After thirty mintues of him futzing with his mis-configured Asterisk server, we got a couple of crystal-clear calls in!
I tried to have a Windows using friend call me with Windows Messenger. Following these [ekiga.org] instructions failed at the login step. Windows Messenger claimed that it couldn't establish a session with ekiga.net. Installing Ekiga and the GTK Runtime worked wonderfully, though. Just like it did on Linux, after my buddy fixed his Asterisk setup.
Are you behind a NAT? If not, would you like to try a SIP call using Windows Messenger?
Re:Product dumping (Score:3, Informative)
Except in non American countries, where they aren't.
Wrong, here in Switzerland Apple holds more than 50% of the educational market [macworld.co.uk] and the top spot in several other European countries. That was 2006, I doubt the rate has dropped, but have no data at hand.
Re:Or (Score:4, Informative)
You can mount the home directory (*) with noexec which means they cannot run anything even if they can compile it. However this doesn't prevent people from writing elaborate Perl scripts, unless you take away Perl/Python/etc, at which point the whole thing starts to get counterproductive.
In any case, what the GP meant is that you can lock down Linux so that users cannot make unauthorized modifications to the base OS, and so that it doesn't need to be reinstalled. To be fair you can do that with Windows too, but it's likely to be easier with Linux because that's how most Linux distros come by default.
Rich.
(*) You have to do this with all user-writable directories, eg. /tmp
Re:Product dumping (Score:4, Informative)
As you pointed out, msword 2007 is massively different, so learning an older version in school wouldn't be much use.
And what guarantee is there that the interface present in 2007 won't be changed again?
What guarantee is there that ms will be so widespread in the future?
No, you should teach general concepts that apply to multiple apps, teach kids how to write documents on computers, not how to specifically use a particular version of msword.
Also, in 1994 wordperfect was still extremely common, teaching exclusively msword then on the assumption that it would be more widely used in future would be the equivalent to teaching exclusively openoffice today. The future looks bright for openoffice, with moves towards standardised formats (even ms plans to implement odf) eliminating obstacles, and tough economic conditions pushing companies to try and reduce costs.. But that's no guarantee.
Re:Product dumping (Score:1, Informative)
I do tech support for a private school.
Most of the educators here have a fetish for all things Apple. They remember the old days when Apple bent over backwards for schools and produced the best machines for all things artsy.
These days, things have changed.
Apple is a huge pain to deal with. They do provide an education discount of around 10 to 20 percent, but that is nothing compared to some of the education and volume deals I can get from Dell or HP. Worse yet is that Apple does not allow resellers to sell Macs to schools. So to take advantage of some deals I have to buy on my own credit card and get reimbursed. A couple years ago, we had problem with some paperwork where Apple refused to sell us any computers at all for about 2 months. I finally broke that stalemate by calling my rep and making an unfavorable comparison between them and IBM.
On top of that, the best price/performance Macs are iMacs, Which are very nice and not over priced, but they have integrated LCD's. So, then I can't upgrade a monitor later on. But also, If I replace that Mac in 3-4 years, I am re-buying a screen. With a PC I could just replace the computer and save 100-200 dollars.
As for the artistic pursuits, the only thing Apple has going for them is iMovie and Final cut pro. My music teachers have very good software on PC. All the Adobe products work well on PC's.
Maintenance wise, the PC is much more affordable. Standard PC hardware is easier to repair. Also, the management tools for PC networks are generations ahead of Apple. Yes, I have an OSX server. It's not as good as Ghost/Active Directory/Kaseya for managing the network. On top of that, OS X 10.4 (I have not played with 10.5 much) has some real weird design flaws in regards to networks. For instance, it allows you to give it a name on the network that in not unique. Also, if you have printer sharing set up, the Mac will re-share any network printers in knows about. Safari can not auto-detect web proxy servers. Etc...
I have kicked around the idea of Open source. But the problem there is training. A) I can not get either the time or budget approved to do training. B) If it were forced, a good number of our faculty are barely computer functional. They would probably quit if I made them use Linux. The Linux price advantage means nothing in the face of these problems. It would be more doable in the computer labs. Still, saving under 100 bucks at the time of purchase, especially since we use computers here until they die, is nothing compared to savings in tech support.
Open Office is more feasible. I could save a lot of money by doing that in the labs and continuing to buy office only for the faculty and staff. Incidentally, I have not yet even upgraded them to Office 2007, even though we are entitled to it, because of the support load for training.