Running into reluctance to adopt open source

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Permalink Reply by Matt Montagne on December 10, 2007 at 9:07pm

Yep, I've seen this. I remember bringing up adding Firefox to our computers and everyone thought that was a risky proposition because we were getting away from standardization with Internet Explorer and because it isn't "supported" in a traditional sense. Now we have Firefox on all of our computers and it is working out quite well. Start with a few things to get people comfortable. When they see that it isn't going to blow everything up, they'll learn to deal with it a little bit.

There does seem to be a prevailing attitude that if you don't pay for it then it must not be any good (in some cases, the attitude is if you don't pay ALOT for it, then it isn't very good!)

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Permalink Reply by Ellen on December 15, 2007 at 1:31pm

Hi Ed,

Here's something they often don't consider regarding proprietory software: When that large company is purchased by another or goes out of business what happens to that 'wonderful' support. Also, for just how long will that company support the version 2.0 that was purchased before 'forcing' an upgrade to 3.0?

Hope this helps.

Ellen

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Permalink Reply by Ed Hitchcock on December 16, 2007 at 7:03am

I hear you! But then the twisted logic is that there is replacement product that can again be purchased. Some software requires not only a purchase, but a yearly licensing fee. There is a Wiki pluggin for Blackboard, for example, that runs $1200 per year. It's built in to Moodle for free!

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Permalink Reply by Alan Hodson on December 16, 2007 at 5:57am

Hi Ed

That kind of attitude is very common. Take a look at some of the other arguments and COUNTER-arguments that I share with those in my district wanting to go beyond the surface: http://toss-elptx.blogspot.com/2007/06/lets-talk-about-open-source.html
Be patient and good luck
Alan
-=o=-

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Permalink Reply by Rashmi Kathuria on December 16, 2007 at 7:18am

I am a mathematics teacher. In my classroom, earlier I was using a proprietary software called GSP for teaching geometry to my students.My problem was that students could not practice the instructions/lessons from home. Then I came to know about open source in a workshop. I explored and found GeoGebra which is an open source software and as good as GSP. Students have downloaded it at home.

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Permalink Reply by Ed Hitchcock on December 16, 2007 at 11:39am

Giving students access to software at home is a very strong argument for Open Source and Freeware apps. Certainly we went that way in our Computer Science classes - the licensing for purchased IDE's was outrageous for home use, so we ditched it in favour of free (and more user friendly!) interfaces.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Ascione on October 25, 2008 at 8:05am

That sounds really interesting... I'm going to check it out, thanks! I was a Math/CS teacher before taking an IT position. If GeoGebra works out I think they'll be thrilled!

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Permalink Reply by Don Watkins on January 9, 2008 at 6:28pm

I'm a free and open source user and a network administrator and I run into this sometimes from some folks who have been drinking the koolaid. When was the last time anyone actually spoke with a real person at Microsoft about anything to do with either their operating system or any of their applications. I believe that the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) campaign lauched by most of these people is not paying off in the long run, but your always going to run into that and from both the Macintosh and Microsoft crowd. You might point out to them that Google runs entirely on open source and its well documented. Most open source projects including Open Office, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, Drupal, Joomla etc. have large groups of highly experienced users only too willing to help.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Lee on June 14, 2008 at 10:41pm

IT people will sometimes think that your new software idea is their new headache. It's tough enough already to get many commercial software packages to play nicely with the rest of the hardware / software combos.

I am an IT guy by training and I run a K-5 computer lab full time as a teacher, and I know what it is like to have software glitches ruin your day. First sign of trouble and hands start flying up and voices start endlessly chirping "something happened", 'I need help', "mines' not working". A bug or buggy piece of software can completely hijack a lesson plan and ruin your day.

the nature of school is to be on a strict by the bell schedule and software and hardware must work on demand as expected over and over and over again no matter the skill or lack thereof of the user in front of it.

Installing software on one machine is no big deal, installing software on many, many machines is a project. Troubleshooting glitches can be anything from a minor annoyance to a major time sucking fiasco.

If you are pushing for a piece of software to be implemented, I recommend that you get to know it yourself forwards and backwards, and then talk to the IT guys knowledgeably about it.


If you are lucky enough to have skilled IT people, then they will be much more amenable to software that can be "pushed" or remotely installed and uninstalled. Nobody wants the tedium and time expense of installing / uninstalling software manually one machine at a time. Many software programmers build in a way for their packages to be remotely and automatically deployed on roomfulls of computers at once. Microsoft office can be installed this way. Many of us are eagerly waiting for Google's "Picasa" program to allow deployment in this manner. I recently asked a programmer of a porn image blocking program if he would make his software remotely installable. I offered to give him a link on our school website and a quick blurb in our newsletter. He gladly did it.

Another avenue is portables. There are a growing number of applications that don't require installation, they are "portable" meaning that they can essentially be run just by clicking on the program icon with no installation required. Lots of these are being made to run from USB flash drives. IT guys would love this.

Remote installation and portables can be big selling points for software you would like to try as they have very low administrative overhead for the IT guys. The more you know about the software and the less headaches it will create for IT, then the more successful you will be getting it deployed.

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Permalink Reply by Carla Cross on June 21, 2008 at 7:29pm

A couple of years ago, I came back from a technology conference jazzed about open source software and presented the information to an administrator heading the technology group. I was informed that we could not use it because "you get what you pay for." Very frustrating!

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Permalink Reply by Olumisti on September 24, 2008 at 2:44am

I switched to Open Office without much hassle. I produce documents for school use. Sorry, I have no complaints.

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Permalink Reply by Randy Orwin on November 10, 2008 at 8:18pm

We are very much an open source shop using a wide variety of open source applications. As you move into the open source world in schools, we have found it is much easier if you start with applications that are not disruptive, meaning that they aren't replacing a commercial product. This is a good way to get open source introduced to both your tech staff and your teachers. A great example of this is Audacity for helping teachers do podcasts. For older students, introduce Freemind for building mind maps. If you don't have a learning management system, install a Moodle server and get some folks to work with Moodle. Find teachers that will pilot stuff and then let it grow from there. Once you have some apps running then you can think about introducing apps that are disruptive, like OpenOffice. Trust me, it is much easier adding new apps than replacing old apps with open source. We are just finishing a roll out of OpenOffice and it has had its share of ups and downs. The other thing that helps is getting folks to look at the glass as being half full instead of half empty. Just my two cents.

Randy Orwin

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