August 2007 — Features
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Opening a New Door
With the potential for cost savings and a growing number of educational applications, open source software is proving to be an effective alternative for schools willing to make the switch.
To Vista or not to Vista; that was
the question looming large for
Christel Powell, manager of information
systems for School
District 118 in Danville, IL.
Microsoft's long-awaited operating
system upgrade was coming,
and Powell had to advise the school
board about the district's computing
platform strategy going forward. If the
district stuck with Windows, the investment
in hardware upgrades needed to
support Microsoft's new, graphically
seductive, resource-gobbling OS would
stretch an already taut budget. On the
other hand, the latest version of a leading
Linux distribution would probably
require few or no hardware upgrades. It
would be, essentially, free, with minor
or no intellectual property restrictions,
and the commercial distributor would
provide competitive support options.
It seemed like a no-brainer to Powell, whose business background made looking at the bottom line something of a reflex. But it still took years for the district to warm to the idea of shifting to an open source platform.
"In education, it's tough to get people to give up what they're used to and comfortable with," Powell says. "But cost is a huge factor. When there's no money to update and upgrade, you start looking for alternative solutions. Faced with the Vista decision and the prospect of upgrading to the next version of Microsoft Office, the board of education and superintendents finally said, ‘OK, open source makes sense.'"
Danville is one of a growing number of K-12 districts that are taking the open source plunge, both to cope with tight budgets and to escape proprietary vendor lock-in and expensive upgrade cycles.
"I think we've reached a tipping point, or we're very close to one," says Steve Hargadon, founder of K12 Computers and project leader of the K-12 Open Technologies Leadership Initiative at the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN). "The people who are managing technology at the schools have a tough job, and they're under enormous pressure to provide computing with very little money. There are some very compelling financial reasons to adopt open technologies, and the link between what's being done in open source and education is growing stronger every year."
Budget concerns figured prominently in Danville's open source strategy. District 118 is part of one of the largest school district units in the state, with 11 schools and more than 700 teachers and staff serving 6,500 students in East Central Illinois. The district is now implementing Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) version 10 on 1,600 desktop machines, and Powell says the district plans to order 600 more. Some of the existing equipment is five years old and would not have met the horsepower requirements to run the new Windows OS.
