FFP Release

[Alphax]

Paul Shirren wrote:
<snip a lot of good points>
> Arguably the weak link is and always has been teachers. It is teachers
> who need to be educated and empowered to use a wider range of tools.
> Schools waste a lot of money on some truly woeful teacher training.
> Often pseudo-science pep-talks from the guru-of-the-day. There is a
> business opportunity for someone to approach schools to provide teacher
> training in OpenOffice, Audacity, Gimp, Blender etc. A lot of good open
> source software will run well on existing school computers and operating
> systems with little effort. This is a very practical and pragmatic way
> to approach things. Realistically, the chances of SA schools switching
> wholesale to Ubuntu are pretty slim.
> 

Wait... is that what's being proposed here? Drop however many hundred
thousand dollars worth of investment in Microsoft products and services
and just migrate to Ubuntu wholesale?

This is a profoundly bad idea.

Schools have got 2 things at the moment:

1. Thousands of dollars of M$ products and support contracts
2. People who have been trained to use M$ products

Forcing Ubuntu (or other distro/setup of your choice) onto them isn't
going to work; they're going to lose money and be stuck not knowing how
to use this stuff.

A multi-phase approach is needed here:

1. Awareness of Free alternatives to existing software, as Paul says in
quoted bit.
2. Training in Free alternatives
3. Demonstration labs
4. Server migration
5. Desktop migration

I know it sounds a bit simplistic, but the reality is - and this is from
experience - that most IT teachers have been dragged into it from
somewhere else, and are going to be very reluctant to learn something
"different" - how happy they were when the last "foreign" Mac left their
schools! (Of course, a few years later they were getting the first of
the iMacs in for multimedia stuff, but that was generally Somebody
Else's Problem.)

-- 
                Alphax
        Death to all fanatics!
  Down with categorical imperative!
OpenPGP key: http://tinyurl.com/lvq4g

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