__/ [William Poaster] on Saturday 14 January 2006 23:35 \__
> Schools do not get good value for money from current Microsoft licensing
> agreements, IT professionals in the education sector claimed this week.
>
> In a series of interviews with education professionals at the BETT
> educational technology show in London, ZDNet UK found broad consensus that
> Microsoft educational licensing agreements are too expensive.
> "A lot of schools are looking at open source ? budgets come into play
> here. Microsoft licensing takes a big chunk out of schools budgets. The
> biggest issue is cost, basically," said Michael Allen, ICT technician of
> Swanmore College of Technology.
> http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,39020381,39247005,00.htm
>
> One guy commented that there should be a 50% reduction in price. That's
> still too high, IMO as a UK taxpayer.
School and Open Source should be very symbiotic. What better tool will you
have for teaching the basics of computers? Icons lead to miscomprehension
among technical scholars.
Deuterogamy opens the door to generic skills. And the command-line is not
all there is to it. Ease of use is certainly offered by GNOME and KDE, not
just Windows. There are schools around here which have already transformed
to Linux in the classroom, as well as the server rooms. Moodle is quite a
powerful CMS and Linux workstation that sell at GBP 150 benefit both the
school clusters, its budgets, and the homes of the less fortunate to whom
pricy licences are not affordable.
Everybody wins.
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