After reading the recent article on the AustralianIT website, I had some thoughts and questions on the decisions which have been made.
Now I know there would many reasons why the decision to go wtih Microsoft and Adobe have been made for the NSW school laptop program (hopefully not for Govt kickback $$). But I would like to pose a question. Why not Linux and open source software in general?
The obvious first point is cost $27 million in licensing vs $0. That has to bare some weight right? To move on to some other technical points though...
Wouldn't any forward thinking body, and hopefuly that is what we have as a government in general, be aware of emering technologies and techniques and that the software delivery model (talking cloud and SaaS) is almost at a "Tipping Point". The software community/business model is changing and even the largest internation companies including Sun, Oracle, IBM and Novell are all leaning towards using Linux and open source as the platform and methodology of choice.
While these corporations still continue to charge for enterprise support and maintenance (usually an option is to also run with the unsupported and more *bleeding edge* versions) they are basing their business models on open source software technologies and solutions.
So to put a 6 year old operating system with a completely proprietary graphics suite and office suite together in a bundle to the fastest adopting and quickest learning minds in the country is a bit, dare I say it backwards, to say the least?
Why not position the schools and students in a position to learn with and use the latest technologies in an open arena (which has to be better for educational methodologies) and provide a set of open and standards compliant graphics and office suites which are going to move into more mainstream use in the very near future.
WIth the latest Linux distributions on offer there are a vast array of security and management tools available which provide more than adequate facilities for mass deployment on this scale. The bundled software is of such high standard and quality that is rivals and oftern surpasses that of the few proprietary applications which will be preinstalled and shipped with the selected laptops. There is also the added advantage of the huge repository of other open source applications and developers which can be installed/deployed easily.
So my question is to the powers that be and solutions providers who have made this decision, why, and can you please justify (and I will accept a logical answer to this question) why you have not gone with a predominantly open source solution for the NSW schools laptop program?
