Battle For Open Standards In Dutch Public Education 89
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Unknown Lamer
from the think-of-the-gnu-slash-children dept.
from the think-of-the-gnu-slash-children dept.
In his first accepted submission, pjstevns writes "The heat is on! With the rising use of online systems for school administration the battle for open and accessible solutions is here, now. Parents are forced to buy 'proper' operating systems from your favorite Redmond based supplier — just to be able to access their children's grades, or participate in classes. A petition addressed at parliament for proper implementation of the open-standards guidelines put forward by the Dutch government itself is buzzing around the Netherlands. Comply or Explain!"
It seems like a major supplier of education software in the Netherlands has written essential software in Silverlight that all students must use, claiming "...Magister is truly multiplatform because Silverlight is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux," despite it more or less being non-functional with Moonlight.
Isn't it great that Flash is dead now? (Score:5, Insightful)
So much about .Net cross-platform.
At least with Java you have to go out of your way to create platform dependency (like hard-coding path separator as "\", and not querying it from the System object), or use 3rd party non-portable libraries with JNI bindings.
Hell, they would have faired better even if they just used some Adobe Air based solution.
Or just use ASP.Net and no Silverlight. They just choose the worst possible solution for a public facing portal.
Shoot the Schoolmaster CIO (Score:5, Insightful)
For making such a stupid decision to move away from Open Standards. If you want stuff to work on the Internet use open standards, simple as that.
Why should users have to go to a desktop computer with a specific OS in order to utilise the system? Maybe it should be made fit for purpose for the modern age.
Re:Costs. Windows is cheaper than Windows + Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
This software only needs to run on one platform, the server. I didn't read TFA but TFS says "just to be able to access their childrens' grades" which should be implementable with a static page. I'm reading slashdot with Firefox on NetBSD, here can you imagine how much effort they must have put in to support that incredible combo? I don't even enable javascript!
Re:Shoot the Schoolmaster CIO (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is not how you change things (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do you focus on Linux? There's this other OS called Mac OSX, which happens to be used by many students who are also having trouble with this. Not to mention the government *itself* decided open standards should be preferred over propietary ones. And all this guy does it point out the hypocricy of that and that there is actually a substantial non-Windows userbase here that is being affected.
I run Linux, I expect no one to care about that and I'm fine with that, but in this case they are just screwing over *every* non-Windows user while there are plenty of alternative ways to present this sort of stuff while not depending on Silverlight. Hell, even Flash would be better (since that at least works, unlike Moonlight, which has never been of any use to me - not a single Silverlight applet I've ever tried actually worked with that..)
Re:This is not how you change things (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is fun. It reports news which basically doesn't exist. This is just some guy who is on an anti-Microsoft bender and wants to somehow make his ideology meaningful in a world which doesn't really give a shit (if the low Linux uptake has anything to go by).
This is not about Linux. It's about whether or not it is okay for public education institutions (and public institutions in general) to force the public to use a specific commercial product if they wish to partake. Given that there are various alternatives to said commercial product, and given that the government has adopted a policy of using open standards where they exist, I think forcing people to use a proprietary system is not okay. The fact that this system is also more expensive than many of the alternatives makes it even more odious.
His rant is way too emotional for something that the politicians and most parents won't even understand.
The story here is really simple: will we force everybody to pay for the most expensive option, or will we use standards, so that people can choose what they use?
If people refuse to understand that, that's still no reason to take the worse option.
I mean, everyone uses Windows right?
Even if that were the case, it would be irrelevant: if standards were used, then _any_ operating system would be able to participate, including Windows. It's not as if, by going with open standards, you would lock out the users who can now use the system. And that's the whole point: to not lock people out.
But they also made the decision to make life more difficult for themselves by going against the grain and choosing to use something other than Windows (an OS pre-installed on virtually all computers you can buy, so having to buy it yourself is unnecessary).
Now you're blaming the victims. It is not them who are making things more difficult, it is the people who implement systems that will only work with specific other products, rather than going with standards that can be supported anywhere.
One could argue that some fights are worth fighting for, but if so... a small petition from a bunch of geeks with too much emotion and too little tact is likely to not do a damn thing.
You may well be right there, especially considering that the government _officially_ has a policy to use open standards and even to prefer open source software - yet, in many cases, has gone for a proprietary solution without even looking into the alternatives.
On the other hand, it was also a small bunch of geeks who discovered that the voting computers we used to use in the Netherlands weren't reliable, and they were tenacious enough to eventually get them all banned - even though the initial reaction was denial, marginalization, and misinformation. It is a good example of exactly what you're up against if you want to replace a vested commercial interest with the right thing, but it also shows that you _can_ win. But you have to raise awareness, first, and that is what those guys are doing.
Re:Not available for the best-selling PC in the wo (Score:2, Insightful)
A quick google gives me the following numbers:
iPad: about 10 million units sold first half 2011. So make that 20-25 million for the year. The total tablet market may reach something like 30 million this year.
PC's: about 350 million units sold in 2010.
iPad and other tablets may get all the press, but generic PC units outsell tablets by more than 10 to 1, and those generic PCs again come >90% with Windows pre-installed. No idea what you've been smoking but your statement is clearly nonsensical. You can stop trolling now. If you have something the world in general has to see, Windows is still a pretty good bet.