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Linux flunks high school

Posted on 22 Nov 2005 at 15:13

David Moss dons his teacher's hat and looks at the cost of switching from Windows to Mac or Linux at his school

What about the cost of these licences? Sure, Linux licences are free (for the most part), but Microsoft doesn't exactly set out to rob schools blind either. I just rang our School's Agreement supplier and these are the current figures (rolling annual licence, per machine where applicable):

Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and Core CALs: £25.50

Microsoft Windows Server 2003: £30

Terminal Server CALs: £14

Exchange Server 2003: £50 (no extra CALs required as they're part of the Core CALs package)

Yes, it's costing me several thousand per year to stay on Windows, and that's money I could spend elsewhere if I could find a total Linux solution. But that amount of money isn't enough, even rolled up over five years, to push the school into change. The software landscape of our user base is too diverse, and the skill sets of our users and managers mean they don't want to spend time problem-solving (given the efforts of one or two I won't mention, problem-solving isn't a route I want them to be going down at all). I could switch to the Mac, because the jolt in terms of the OS is quite small and anything that isn't available under the Mac would probably run under Windows on the Mac. No technical problem, but way too expensive.

I could perhaps see where schools and businesses with hundreds of systems and the accompanying licence bills might contemplate the move to Linux, even with the cost of retraining taken into account, but for smaller schools I just don't see it, given Microsoft's current educational pricing structure. Small businesses obviously don't get the benefit of such education prices, so they have a much larger bill to think about, but once you start thinking about specialist software and where your alternatives are coming from on the Linux platform far too many doors slam shut for my liking.

I'd love to save the money, but I see no way I reliably could; all I see is a road full of frustration for myself and my users, and the definite possibility that I'd have to keep several Windows systems around anyway to run software that wouldn't run under Linux. On the admin side, that's most of the key programs we use, so switching them isn't an option, and it isn't much better on the school side.

The retraining costs would be terrible in terms of cash and time, and to be honest, at the end of the day, I'm not convinced I'd be ending up with a better environment to work in. The chance of someone doing something unintentional and rendering the system unrecoverable is a lot higher under Linux, for example. Having taken a good look at about seven Linux distros, I came to the conclusion that none of them was as user-friendly as I'd like, and all required a far higher degree of user ability and computing knowledge than my users currently have. I also found it disappointing that at least one major distro wouldn't even install on my school systems, having huge difficulty with the onboard graphics, something that Windows XP has no difficulty with whatsoever. Pentium III systems with onboard graphics might not be bleeding edge, but they work well for my needs, and a modern OS that can't work with them is no use to me. Linux has a lot going for it, but it's a long way behind either Windows or Mac OS X in terms of what it can offer to an organisation like mine at the moment.