[Westwales] Linux in schools

[Simon Burns]

On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Mark Illsley wrote:

> on another note,  i have just had a promotion and have been put in 
> charge of deploying and administoring all the servers that the company 
> that i work for build and have service contracts for. a number of these 
> are in schools and small businesses.  I am planning to start a local 
> project to get open source into these places and was wondering if anyone 
> had any idea's or if any one would like to get involved in any way. 

Clarification please, Mr Spock :)

I just left a job at Coleg Ceredigion but left behind me a few Linux
systems which afaik are still in use. This is an improvement on the last
school sys admin job I left (a few years ago) where they replaced all my
Linux boxes with Microsoft-for-Everything [tm]. Then paid the price in
downtime, higher costs, etc, etc including a recent 2.5 week email
outage. Laugh? I nearly did.

I am totally confident that in the right hands (ie mine, yours ;-) Linux
boxes can be hugely successful in schools and colleges. But how do you
plan to introduce them? Who takes care of support? What about training,
both for systems administrators and associated techies? To what extent is
your company planning to do provide these services? Are they willing to
sub-contract any or all of them? How do you plan to convince the
management types who (perhaps regrettably) get to make the purchasing
decisions?

I'm not asking all these questions to put you off, I think schools and
colleges deserve to get better than more Microsoft over-priced, vulnerable
rubbish (I'll skip the sermon now but I fell *very* strongly about this).  
But I'd be interested to hear your ideas about how this might be
structured, and (when you ask for involvement) what you mean. I'm
particularly interested because I might be prepared to help if I can be
convinced your ideas might work.

--
Simon Burns