

Why haven't cash-strapped American schools embraced open source? - rainmaker23
http://www.informationweek.com/education/campus-infrastructure/3-reasons-linux-doesnt-star-in-us-school/240155736

======
japhyr
Story time. I teach high school math and science at a small school, where we
have roughly 30 computers. About four years ago, our district had not funded
any new hardware in 8 years. So when we started that school year, only 3
computers actually worked.

I had just started using linux that year, so I ran a class introducing
students to linux. I taught students to install and maintain ubuntu systems,
and suddenly all 30 computers were working again. Students maintained those 30
computers for the next year and a half. It was a bittersweet time when the
district funded hardware again, and we had 30 new machines running Windows 7.
I am fortunate to work in a district where I was supported in teaching
students to dual-boot half of those machines.

It has been an overwhelmingly positive experience to bring linux into a school
system. Many students are now running linux on their own machines. I still
teach an intro to programming class that uses linux exclusively, and on any
given day a small number of students are choosing linux for their everyday
school work.

I also saw the politics of trying to make open source more mainstream in the
district. When the district was deciding what machines and what software to
purchase, we almost went with openoffice. I didn't take a side in the
conversation, I just kept reiterating that both MSOffice and LibreOffice work
as long as everyone in the district is using the same software. The real
friction comes when people are trying to share formatted documents between
systems. The district was just about to go with openoffice, but for no clear
reason at the last minute the superintendent made a unilateral decision to go
with MSOffice. I think it was easier to appease the few loud MSOffice
supporters, knowing everyone else would move on, than go with something new
and risk having made the "wrong" decision.

I've been getting more into programming, including trips to PyCon last year
and this year. The more involved I get in the professional programming
community, the more I see how much the open source world has to offer the
education world. The obvious benefit is open software. There is a tremendous
need for high-quality open software to make educational work more efficient.
My favorite example is that most teachers still write their lesson plans in
Word, which is like programmers working in an old version of Notepad.
Programmers have had vim and emacs for 40 years, but teachers still don't have
a dedicated curriculum planning tool.

I love to talk about this stuff, so feel free to get in touch through my
profile.

~~~
b0rsuk
Sounds a lot like committee stuffing. Have you read the "Evangelism is War"
internal Microsoft document ?

[http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20071023002351...](http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20071023002351958)

Juicy quote below:

"""Our mission is to establish Microsoft's platforms as the de facto standards
throughout the computer industry.... Working behind the scenes to orchestrate
"independent" praise of our technology, and damnation of the enemy's, is a key
evangelism function during the Slog. "Independent" analyst's report should be
issued, praising your technology and damning the competitors (or ignoring
them). "Independent" consultants should write columns and articles, give
conference presentations and moderate stacked panels, all on our behalf (and
setting them up as experts in the new technology, available for just
$200/hour). "Independent" academic sources should be cultivated and quoted
(and research money granted). "Independent" courseware providers should start
profiting from their early involvement in our technology. Every possible
source of leverage should be sought and turned to our advantage.

I have mentioned before the "stacked panel". Panel discussions naturally favor
alliances of relatively weak partners - our usual opposition. For example, an
"unbiased" panel on OLE vs. OpenDoc would contain representatives of the
backers of OLE (Microsoft) and the backers of OpenDoc (Apple, IBM, Novell,
WordPerfect, OMG, etc.). Thus we find ourselves outnumbered in almost every
"naturally occurring" panel debate.

A stacked panel, on the other hand, is like a stacked deck: it is packed with
people who, on the face of things, should be neutral, but who are in fact
strong supporters of our technology. The key to stacking a panel is being able
to choose the moderator. Most conference organizers allow the moderator to
select the panel, so if you can pick the moderator, you win. Since you can't
expect representatives of our competitors to speak on your behalf, you have to
get the moderator to agree to having only "independent ISVs" on the panel. No
one from Microsoft or any other formal backer of the competing technologies
would be allowed – just ISVs who have to use this stuff in the "real world."
Sounds marvelously independent doesn't it? In fact, it allows us to stack the
panel with ISVs that back our cause. Thus, the "independent" panel ends up
telling the audience that our technology beats the others hands down. Get the
press to cover this panel, and you've got a major win on your hands.

Finding a moderator is key to setting up a stacked panel. The best sources of
pliable moderators are:

    
    
        -- Analysts: Analysts sell out - that's their business model. But they are very concerned that they never look like they are selling out, so that makes them very prickly to work with.
    
        -- Consultants: These guys are your best bets as moderators. Get a well-known consultant on your side early, but don't let him publish anything blatantly pro-Microsoft. Then, get him to propose himself to the conference organizers as a moderator, whenever a panel opportunity comes up. Since he's well- known, but apparently independent, he'll be accepted – one less thing for the constantly-overworked conference organizer to worry about, right?"""

~~~
japhyr
I know that stuff goes on, but it's amazing that people put stuff like this in
writing.

------
specialist
I currently work on "student facing" products in higher ed. Find courses.
Register for classes. Degree audit. Etc. My work is just a small slice.

It's all open source. I took the job because I believe that open source
solutions for government and non-profits are the Correct Answer.

Now, a few years later, I'm disillusioned.

The work I do, one cannot push harder. Like an octopus, the harder you push,
the harder the problem fights back. Rather, you have to come at everything
sideways. Covertly lay out a tarp to the side of the problem. Sneak up on the
problem. Whack it on the head. Hope that it falls onto the tarp. Once it's
unconscious, drag the tarp in a generally useful direction. Quickly. Before
the problem wakes back up. Before it starts to wander off in some random
direction and resumes eating everything in sight.

The IT needs for higher ed are so varied and complicated, there is no one size
fits all. I don't see how any code I've written could possibly be used as-is
any where else. It's barely useful across all our colleges and departments.

My prior real gig was basically a lot of ETL for medical records for regional
health organizations. The higher ed stuff I do now is far more complicated,
overall. Which really surprised me.

The community governance model for collaborative development of open source
software is very, very, very inefficient. I came from doing startups. Working
higher ed, I can't believe how long stuff takes. And what does get
accomplished is lowest common denominator stuff, stone soup style. Imagine
doing pair programming XP style with the stupidest people you've ever worked
with. Now have those people do "software architecture".

I don't know so much about K-12 and community colleges.

But methinks continuous improvement, cultural change for higher ed IT is
hopeless.

First, it's wicked hard problem. Scheduling, resourcing, registration,
financing, payroll, etc. You'd never guess how much work goes into determining
if a class is open (for enrollment) or closed. Now imagine that deliberation
for absolutely every function within an organization as heterogenous and weird
as a university.

Second, every single mailstop within the organization insists on their own
unique super double plus awesome way of doing things. Not better or worse,
just different.

Third, there is no existential crisis which can be used to ram change down
every one's throats. A president or provost or whoever really is just a fund
raising figure head. They're not an executive like a CEO. They're more like
the secretary general of the UN.

The only way I can imagine higher ed IT can be "solved" is for GATT style
agreement for how stuff should be done to be forged. But I don't want to see
that. I love universities for their complexity, weirdness, variety,
unruliness. To become an organization with straight forward IT needs, it'd
become just a diploma mill. And that'd suck.

------
wiredfool
In my area, it's that the technology budget is separate from the general fund
budget. The general fund, which pays for teachers, facilities maintenance, and
things like libraries is squeezed by falling payments from the state and a cap
on the amount of local contribution. We're losing teachers each year (I think
7 years and counting) and the overall budget is down about 35% from the peak
in the early 2000s. The local voters haven't rejected a general levy in many
years, although they did reject a capital levy for a renovation to combine two
schools. (that would have closed a school campus that dates from the early
1900s and needs seismic upgrades to be safe, and moved the students to the
half empty high school)

The tech budget is funded by separate tech levies, which can only be spent on
computers or tech related staff.

This leaves the district in the strange place of being able to afford iPads
all around for a couple grades in middle school, but not being able to afford
a librarian for the primary school. There can be a media specialist, but only
if the media is not books. They can have smart whiteboards in each classroom.
But not a librarian.

~~~
chatmasta
Let's start a charity where developers donate time to migrate local schools to
open source.

~~~
atgm
It's not just the migration, but the support. I wouldn't want to be reliant on
charity or the type of support many open-source projects have if I were a
school.

~~~
reedlaw
When I've helped rid people of their virus-infested Windows problem by
installing Ubuntu, I rarely heard back from them. It really is easier to use
and less error-prone in many respects.

------
Moto7451
Granted, every School District is going to have its own way of dealing with
IT, but here's how things were during my stint volunteering at a LA Unified
School District elementary school between 2002-2004.

First of all there was some up front payment the school/district made to their
contracted IT provider. Wehn purchasing computers, no matter what type of
computer you wanted, it would cost at least $1400/unit. This was because it
came as a package deal with "support". Typically this meant the choice of an
e/iMac or iBook or some cheap Dell box with a cheap 15" CRT. As a result the
much better equipped, teacher preferred, Macs were typically what were
purchased for classrooms and the bargain basement Dells made it into admin
offices. Additionally a server for At Ease for Workgroups[1] was occasionally
purchased for some other ridiculous number I don't remember.

At this particular school, even if you could switch the entire campus to FOSS
software, it wouldn't really affect costs because the school signed a contract
to lock the price in at a certain rate. The contracting company would have
just pocketed the savings.

Now, the worst part was the the price premium for "support" bought you the
privlidge of having the the buck passed to Apple for Mac support (basically
some sort of Applecare for Education) or shipping in a new Dell that would sit
in a supply closet until they sent someone out... if they ever did. Hence why
I was volunteering.

The school was pretty lucky as computer purchases tended to be an uncommon
event as this school was near Universal Studios and Warner Brothers and both
would regularly donate a number of their two year old "outdated" machines. A
lot of what I ended up doing was replacing aging LC IIs[2] and Performa
575s[3] with the new computers.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease>
[2]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC>
[3]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC_500_series>

------
moocow01
A lot of it is just actually due to legacy.

It may be hard to understand here but tech in education takes a back seat in
most standard schools. There are not a lot of (if any) resources in most
schools available for tech support, upgrades, hardware, etc.

So what happened was that 10-20+ years back schools slowly integrated tech and
computers - Windows was really the only sensible choice for most institutions
in that it allowed for everyone (non-techies) to run software that met the
needs of students, teachers, admins, etc. PCs and Windows was the sensible and
natural choice back then and everyone jumped on.

The problem now is that the cost to migrate hardware, software, licenses,
systems, and knowledge to better platforms is significant, daunting and costly
even if the new stuff is free. Its analogous to building a city around one
center point for years and then realizing that you want to move the whole city
5 miles down the road with everything basically continuing to function (oh
yeah and on a shoestring budget).

On the bright side the education system is filled with many who are tech
savvy. They know the tech sucks... its pretty obvious when you have to use IE6
for some online lesson plan and then you go home and watch Netflix on your
iPhone. So there is pressure there and things are moving but it will be slow
and painful and likely whenever you send your kids to school you will gasp in
horror at the tech museum they call the computer lab.

(On a side note if you are entrepreneur in edtech - the most important thing
you can understand is what the tech landscape looks like to students and
teachers and administrators. Very different for all 3 groups and very detached
from the tech saturated environment of Silicon Valley)

------
sumukh1
When I was in high school, I created an iOS app [1] for my school district and
we made it open source (on the school district's GitHub [2] ) so other
districts could benefit. Quotes from established ed-tech companies for a
similar product were very expensive (especially compared to the cost of self-
publishing). There certainly was interest from other districts to adopt it
because they heard of the project and saw that it was open-source. The problem
was getting someone to get them through the last 25% (customization, graphics,
publishing, maintenance).

There's now a team of student developers at the school district who help keep
the project going. I believe this makes it first the school district to create
open source software in California.

[1] App (now also on Google Play):
<https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifusd/id454673943?mt=8>

[2] GitHub: <https://github.com/FremontUnified/>

------
Everlag
The thing about schools and computers is that it really is a losing battle on
the part of the school. They wish to provide the students with easy to access
to tech to allow them to become intimately familiar with it to advance in the
world.

Then they have students use computers for the most simplistic things. Typing
up essays and getting to piece together a video in windows movie maker is the
absolute extent of what the above average Canadian high school can do. They
don't understand, they being the old guard of teaching, the things a modern
computer can do because they think in analogue methodologies, not digital.

Only within the last few years have we replaced overheads and transparencies
with 'smart boards' and projectors and even then, few teachers have been found
to use them in any manner other than an even more LIMITED version of the
traditional overhead. Very recently the younger teachers have built small
wordpress sites or shared google drives for notes because of ease and personal
comfort which is a giant step forward but moot for all it does to solve the
issue of the unsavvy teachers.

If a school were to wise up and switch to open source, the amount of headache
from staff is simply impossible to imagine. The students can understand the
rapid pace of technology and the very new or extremely impassioned teachers
can cope with it where the older teachers throw their hands into the air and
bring out the transparencies. A billion dollars to the person to come up with
a way of easily transitioning them to modern method.

Sorry for the rant, but education hits close to home for me.

~~~
pyre

      | Only within the last few years have we replaced
      | overheads and transparencies with 'smart boards'
      | and projectors and even then, few teachers have
      | been found to use them in any manner other than
      | an even more LIMITED version of the traditional
      | overhead.
    

Back in 2001, my university microeconomics course was delivered via overhead
transparencies (rather than Powerpoint like most other classes). But even the
usage of transparencies was too much for this professor. All of his 'slides'
were just transparencies which he had used a wet-erase marker to write dense
paragraphs of text, which was mostly what he was reading back to us. Not only
was this worse than most usage of PowerPoint that people complain about, he
didn't even take the time to maybe type up these 'slides' and print them on
transparencies (or go to a local office supply store / print shop to get it
done).

Point being some people will use the tools presented to them (even very basic
tools) in the most bone-headed way possible. It's just a fact of life.

------
csense
I wish the guy quoted in the article was more specific about features that
LibreOffice lacks. Information that's actionable for developers is likely to
result in improvements.

Complaints like "We don't like it" just split proponents and opponents of the
software into opposing factions and aren't productive.

~~~
dizzystar
Try this:

The front page should not have a page number.

Please place a header on each page. On the even pages, the header should be on
the left, on the odd pages, the header should be on the right. On the bottom-
center of each page, place the page number, except for the front page, as
specified above.

The above is probably a bit much, but it is, as far as I know, absolutely
impossible to do in Libre Office, or it is not, it is extremely difficult to
do, but this sort of formatting is absolutely trivial in MS.

If the above sounds to complex, then try creating a working TOC in Libre
Office.

The grammar and spell-checking capabilities are not very good in LO.

I've also had many doc -> PDF conversion problems in LO. There are many other
smallish issues.

LO is about as much of a replacement for MS Suite as Gimp is a viable
replacement for Photoshop for productivity and real-world work. I use the FOSS
stuff at home, but my overall productivity is way lower at home as well. I've
ran into many things I simply cannot do. It really is a cost-to-productivity
ratio here. MS Suite really isn't that expensive if you compare the speed and
accuracy you can accomplish common tasks.

~~~
cperciva
_The front page should not have a page number.

Please place a header on each page. On the even pages, the header should be on
the left, on the odd pages, the header should be on the right. On the bottom-
center of each page, place the page number, except for the front page, as
specified above.

The above is probably a bit much, but it is, as far as I know, absolutely
impossible to do in Libre Office, or it is not, it is extremely difficult to
do, but this sort of formatting is absolutely trivial in MS.

If the above sounds to complex, then try creating a working TOC in Libre
Office._

... on the other hand, those are all trivial thing to do in LaTex. Maybe the
problem is people using Libre Office for things which Libre Office is not
designed to do?

~~~
flomo
You could do all of above in Word version 4.0.

Why isn't Libre Office designed to create a report which can be printed and
bound? Seems like a basic word processing task.

~~~
gaius
Because none of the developers does that themselves, I suspect, and because
said developers probably personally believe that paper is "obsolete" anyway so
resist adding features like that when asked.

~~~
flomo
When launching LO Writer, one is presented with a virtual blank sheet of
paper. The entire metaphor of the program is built around printing.

In any case, I have virtually no Libre Office experience, and I was able to
generate dizzystar's test case in about 2 minutes. My apologies for leading us
down this dead-end discussion. (The only confusing part was that you have to
manually turn on headers & footers before you can click on them to edit.)

When it comes down to it, LO is probably not missing many features, but they
haven't received the UI research/testing effort to make them accessible. The
general look & feel is also 'old fashioned'.

------
fixxer
How awesome if would be if Windows dominance was limited to K-12... I want to
live in that world.

I'm in University and I still find myself explaining to "cyberinfrastructure"
developers that their "novel idea" is really just cron + shell + GUI, of which
the first two have been around since the 70's (and their "novel" GUI sucks).
Combine that with the legion of Matlab programmers cranked out by engineering
departments (Python? you mean this is free?!), and I think schools primarily
succeed at creating more consumers of technology, rather than the producers
they purport.

~~~
mc-lovin
Python and Matlab are not interchangeable.

Matlab is unique in its expressiveness for numerical and matrix computation,
and value semantics.

Value semantics matter a lot because they result in functional programming
without even having to think about it, while copy-on-write means that you can
pass big objects into pure functions and they never get copied if you don't
modify them.

e.g. in Matlab, the following function is pure (and never makes a copy of
big_matrix)

    
    
      function y = my_pure_function(x, big_matrix)
      x = x + big_matrix(i, j);
      y = x ^ 2;
      end

~~~
fixxer
> Python and Matlab are not interchangeable.

Matlab and Python are perfectly interchangeable for the overwhelming majority
of undergrads and graduate students. Claiming that they are not
interchangeable based on the difference between pass-by-reference and copy-on-
write is just silly.

You're ignoring the typical use case for an engineering student: general math
& plotting. In Python, that is easily accomplished with NumPy, SciPy, and
Matplotlib. These are all free.

Kudos on knowing how these languages work and understanding some low-level
design specifications, but negative kudos for not understanding the education
system and the immense fiscal burden it places on students for books &
software. Sure, many schools provide a free license... here is a little tidbit
of information for you: ain't nothing free.

~~~
mc-lovin
> Claiming that they are not interchangeable based on the difference between
> pass-by-reference and copy-on-write is just silly.

Actually I gave one more reason.

~~~
fixxer
> Matlab is unique in its expressiveness for numerical and matrix computation

It really isn't. <http://wiki.scipy.org/NumPy_for_Matlab_Users>

~~~
mc-lovin
it is.

I read that link already, in fact used it as a reference when I did convert
from Matlab to python. I converted back when I realized that in spite of the
apparent syntactic similarities, matlab is still very different to scipy.

In matlab, everything is a matrix. The only "gotchas" when it comes to types,
is that

    
    
      f = X(X > 0)
    

and

    
    
      f = X(double(X > 0))
    

give different answers because logical indexing requires actual logical type.
Apart from this, you will almost never have to do type conversions in matlab.

Python arrays are not scipy matrices or arrays. And a scipy 1 x n array is not
a matrix.

All these little things add up to more time spent thinking about programming
and less about mathematics.

Don't think of me as some biased matlab fanatic.

I am a grad student, and I found the appeal of python as strong as those who
advocate it as a substitute for matlab. The difference is that when it came
down to doing my actual work, I just couldn't do it as easily in python. I am
the student whose interests you claim to be advocating, and I'm explaining why
I, and so many others, make the choice of matlab.

~~~
fixxer
Oh well... easy for me, hard for you. Best of luck! :)

------
alexbell
I've seen rms speak before, and one point he made really hit home. It is
absolutely inexcusable for a school to teach using what is essentially a
mystery black box. If a student wants to be able to open up the source code
and see how things work, they should be able to.

~~~
gaius
That's clearly nonsense, tho'. In school you teach at a level of abstraction,
it's the same anywhere. We don't require someone to make paper and ink before
they learn to write. We don't make people become mechanics before they learn
to drive. People with the interest study those things _after_ their basic
schooling is complete.

~~~
xenophonf
Dunno where you went to school, but my CS education taught me the full stack -
computer architecture, a wide variety of programming languages and styles,
abstractions from simple data types to objects, and language
design/implementation. We went up and down levels of abstraction, and my
teachers put an emphasis on knowing how things worked or how to use tools in a
general sense (instead of just using C++ or Java or Objective-C or Visual
Studio for the entire baccalaureate program). Being able to look at existing
code bases was really helpful in this regard, even though Appel et al's Tiger
compiler is a tiny little toy compared to real compilers like GCC or LLVM.
It's anecdotal but I can tell you that so far in my career, being able to
examine IT services from the business process (good ol' layer 8) all the way
down to the electrons whizzing by has been a definitive advantage, and one not
shared by many of my fellow IT admins or software developers.

As for your car analogy, I think we should do a better job of teaching new
drivers how cars work, how they perform under different operating conditions,
the physics and the mechanics involved, etc. Again it's anecdotal, but I saw
my child's driving improve quite a bit after taking one of those car control
clinics, in which a solid understanding of the physics and construction of
cars played an important part.

~~~
gaius
Your secondary school? Really? I call shenanigans.

~~~
xenophonf
Whoops, sorry - I didn't realize you meant K-12.

------
dsrguru
I remember asking my high school's one-man IT department this exact question,
and he said that the school needs someone to sue in the event something goes
wrong.

~~~
brokenparser
Lie. No one ever sues MSFT for delivering a bad product, let alone (cash-
strapped) schools.

~~~
jlgreco
I think in reality the reason is a sort of _"nobody ever got fired for buying
IBM"_ mentality.

I know that if _I_ found myself suddenly a school technology administrator
person, I would be _very_ inclined to take the easy way out and just install
windows on all the lab computers. I would do this if only so that I did not
have to fight the stupid mentality of _"You have to teach these 5th graders
how to use obscure features of a version of MS Word that will be a decade and
a half out of date by the time they graduate"_

Seriously, every "vocational" computer skills class I ever had was absolutely
worthless. They should shitcan all of those classes and teach something that
is actually worldview expanding... but that will never happen. The people in
charge of making those decisions will all inevitably think that those courses
are important because they are teaching the tools that _they_ are _currently_
using.

------
sakura_k
At Microsoft I work with an organization named TEALS (Technology Education and
Literacy in Schools) which places volunteer software engineers with schools to
teach intro computer science & programming classes to high school students.
The program has greatly supplemented the intro CS teaching resources available
in the Seattle area.

However, the volunteers run into massive roadblocks with school IT
departments. Want to install a new browser or (a god forbid) an IDE on lab
computers? Expect at least a semester of hand wringing.

This isn't the fault of the IT staff, it's a result of massive underfunding of
public education. Everyone does the best they can but school employees are
stretched so thin already that it's very hard to drive change to computing
resources that are a prerequisite for computing education for those students
who don't have access to their own DEV environment.

Long story short: school systems that are strapped for cash don't have the
capital resources to bring an alternative architecture up to parity as a
teaching tool. They don't even have the resources to support volunteer
teachers.

~~~
Falkon1313
I don't understand. How much funding does it take to install a browser (or
even an IDE)? Do they really save money by wasting an entire semester or more
doing something that should be so quick and simple?

------
guelo
Somewhat off topic but I just wanted to point out that American GDP has
recovered and is now higher than before the recession. In fact it's higher
than it's ever been. GDP per capita is higher than ever. We are, as a country,
richer than we have ever been. But somehow funding for schools keeps dropping.

~~~
PavlovsCat
" _A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life
when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit._
" -- D. Elton Trueblood

Such a person would also be counterproductive using the criteria of
capitalism, and I think the rest follows from that.

------
codex
The article here is spot on: 1\. Market share 2\. Unfamiliarity 3\. Technical
gaps

Of these, perhaps #1 is the most important, and to some extent impacts #2 and
#3. Linux has a 1% usage share [1]. Schools would be doing students a
disservice by teaching them such a marginal desktop technology, when the
opportunity cost of teaching them a mainstream operating system is so high. To
the masses, Windows skills are more valuable than Linux skills. I'd love to
squeeze my own favorite esoteric topics into the curriculum, but there are
only so many things you can teach in a day or a year, and you have to choose
based on maximum benefit.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems)

~~~
wildgift
I was going to say something like that, but less eloquently.

I handle a small network, and deploy Windows and Office mainly because most
people know it, easing the training burden on me.

This isn't a software company here. If it were, obviously, using LibreOffice
would be the way to go.

------
mc-lovin
This was a good article, and I think it's important to point out that it
doesn't just give reasons why US schools _don't_ use open source software, but
that these reasons (especially 1. and 3.) also explain why US schools
_shouldn't_ use open source software.

Eventually I believe the economics will change, but we are not there yet.
There may be special cases where talented individuals have donated their time
to set up and maintain open source software in schools, but this is no more
indicative of the true economics than if Microsoft had donated an entire
computer lab for free. Rather than evangelize open source for all use cases, I
think that we should render unto Microsoft what is Microsoft's.

------
ADent
At $11,125 per student in total funding (not counting $359 food services fund)
I wouldn't call our local schools cash-strapped. They do call themselves cash
strapped though.

~~~
lostlogin
How many students per teacher (or possibly easier to calculate but less
accurate, how many students per class)? That does seem... Lots.

------
mieses
The real battle is between native and cloud apps.

~~~
lostlogin
Does anyone not agree that a bit of both is best? A bad connection kills you
otherwise. There is a middle ground.

~~~
mieses
as in chromebooks?

~~~
lostlogin
Maybe, I haven't used one. I was thinking of favourites of mine. Instapaper
and Dropbox were at the front of my mind.

