[Wolves] Sick of M$

stephen welch stephenwelch at hotmail.com
Mon Jul 30 11:08:51 BST 2007


Has anyone looked at the Becta Website.

It is massive portal for schools and the use of ICT in them.  Linux hardly 
gets a mention.  There are a number of MS publications on the site and it is 
no wonder with the marketing power MS has schools / our children are very MS 
orientated.  No doubt of course some of these partnership deals are done on 
the golf course and the government loves to be sucked up to by Bill Gates 
and his clan.

It is waste of time bashing MS put the effort into building Linux.  If you 
want Linux in schools the community (Open Advantage, m6-it.org) should be 
building relationships with Becta and the likes.  I know M6-IT has some 
projects running.

I went to the Sat Guadec and felt really empowered by the OS community.  
There were geek guys in raincoats talking about the finer details of UI 
design. Not really a Linux man yet (system admin) but I have really taken on 
board the OS spirit.

I have just started on my own and will be looking to push Linux into schools 
where I can.  It is these sort of things and other activies at the bottom 
end that will help us build more choice / variety into education.  Help from 
the wider community by organisastions such as Open Advantage , M6-IT, etc, 
etc at the top end will also help.  Do they play golf?

Stephen

PS I only buy from PC world when really desperate or get suckered when 
looking at the bargins table.




>From: chris at robotninja.net
>Reply-To: Wolverhampton Linux User Group <wolves at mailman.lug.org.uk>
>To: <wolves at mailman.lug.org.uk>
>Subject: RE: [Wolves] Sick of M$
>Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 10:00:04 +0200
>
>I know that this is probably going to be a somewhat controversial 
>viewpoint, but I think that people need to quit needlessly bashing 
>Microsoft.
>
>No offence, Rob, but can you see how it could be seen as at least a little 
>hypocritical for the OSS community to criticise MS for donating hardware 
>and software to schools, when there are a number of OSS projects such as 
>the OLPC which are doing broadly the same thing?
>
>I think that we need to stop using MS as "the enemy". Too many people seem 
>to want to 'beat' MS, which is fine but I'd rather focus on objectively 
>improving the OS and making it the obvious choice.
>
>I agree that MS has a big marketing budget, and that they often engage in 
>business activities which are questionable at best - the recent patent 
>protection racket spring to mind - but I don't see how anyone could spin 
>putting computers in money-starved schools as a bad thing.
>
>(yes, I'd rather they ran Linux in schools - but ideally, I'd want the 
>users to choose their OS. If they'd genuinely rather run Vista, that's fine 
>by me.)
>
>Chris
>
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