Gov tells Schools to dump Microsoft
Reported in a few places, I’ll link to /., BECTA (the IT wing of the Department for Education and Skills) is suggesting schools in the UK could save loads of money by dumping Microsoft, and going open source for their software.
Before I reply to this, let me make clear this disclaimer, I work for a company that sells Educational Software, primarily to Schools, most of which is built to run on Windows (though we don’t write any software ourselves). Previously I’ve also worked for the County Council supporting schools IT, with specific focus on Special Needs IT.
That out of the way, I’ll mention some things that BECTA may not be mentioning….
There is a load of great software out there, designed to help kids learn, to help support teachers with their lessons and develop pupils abilities. There is a great deal of innovation in the Educational Software sector, specifically within the Primary age groups (4-11 yr olds).
Most of this software is for Windows. There’s a fair amount that also runs on Mac, and in some areas, Mac’s are very popular within schools.
But I don’t know that there’s much for Linux, which is what BECTA are on about. Certainly we don’t label products that will run on Linux.
If schools were to move to Linux for their school machines, there would be very little in the way of software to help support the teaching of the pupils.
Sure, they could use Linux and something like OpenOffice for the admin machines, those that the Office staff and that use. But what about the ICT suites? There are some great products such as Clicker, or Wordshark (a couple of our long term most popular products) that I jsut don’t think run on Open Source platforms like Linux. Being a relative niche industry (albeit a lucrative one at times), many software publishers are very small companies, maybe only compromising of a 2 or 3 people to write the programmes and market/sell them (which is where reseller companies like the one I work for come int handy). To ask some of those people to rewrite their software from the ground up to work on Linux would be pretty impossible.
Though with all of this, it is a bit of a chicken and the egg scenario. No one going to write software to run on Linux if no-ones using it. And no-ones going to use Linux if there’s no software for it.
It’s a nice idea to save Schools some money by promoting Open Source, but considering their whole goal is to educate children, surely you have to ensure there is a good backbone of supporting software for that purpose before making that kind of recommendation.