[Fsfe-ie] Ireland OA Policy
Andrew Clarke
andrew.clarke at dkit.ie
Mon Jan 26 15:18:57 CET 2009
Hi,
I was pleasantly surprised to hear of this letter in the Irish Times.
Whilst I fully agree with Bobs qualifying of the issues around the area
of School ICT, I do think that there is room for improvement on this
front. We are now clearly in deep recession and any reduction in budgets
for Schools will of course also affect IT as well as other areas. If
FOSS is more widely adopted in schools just simply to save costs, and
without any understanding of the meaning / philosophy behind this type
of software, then so be it.
Going back to the original letter, whilst I think that the idea of
saving money by using FOSS is a good one, and every euro saved reduces
the possibility of job losses etc., I do think that switching OS is a
huge change for users. There is an argument that every MS Windows
upgrade is quite a large change, but I'm not sure that change is on the
same scale as switching for instance to Linux. A ''softer'' target is
application software and I have easily persuaded many users to use
OpenOffice.org in place of MS Office. Again, Office 2007 was a large
change for users and instead of this, a migration to OOo can actually be
less painful for users.
According to the governments own latest report on education funding,
there are around 85,500 computers in education. If the political will
was there, huge savings can be made without adversely affecting users
too much. A back of envelope calculation on this would go something like
this. If reduced / volume license / educational license is averaged as
low as 30 euro, this still amounts to 2.5 million euro which would go
some way to reducing the strain on educational budgets. If it simply
saved a few jobs, it would still be worthwhile.
Money talks, especially in politics and especially in recession. Asking
government to justify unnecessarily spending money on software which has
an equivalent which is cost free is the right question to ask. It simply
cannot be justified.
I realise that I have over-simplified the situation in order to
highlight my point, but I do think that at it's core, this is a simple
decision and we should take our lead from some of the many governments
adopting FOSS widely within the public service. Any lobbying of
government to this end is welcome.
kind regards,
Andrew Clarke
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