August 2007 — Features
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Opening a New Door
It's also perfectly reasonable—and for some, advisable—to take baby steps toward open technologies, says K12 Computers' Hargadon. "Open source is great, and I'm all for it, but no one should feel like they have to dive into it whole hog," he says. "People who manage computing resources in school districts are facing very real workloads, and it's not reasonable to expect them to convert to open source overnight. You can use OpenOffice in a Windows environment, for example, and see how it goes. You can dip your toe into the open source pool, find something that's valuable to your school, and not feel as though you have to convert everything."
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Whether schools are at a tipping point or still approaching it, once they tip, they're likely to roll fast down the other side, says Dave Gynn, director of enterprise tools and frameworks at Optaros, a Boston-based consulting and systems integration firm specializing in open source software. "People who go to open source very rarely say, 'Hey, let's throw this out and go back to paying license fees and being restricted,'" Gynn says. "Once you get over the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about how open source works and how you might support it, you just do more and more and more. Right now there's a good open source alternative for nearly everything."
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John K. Waters is a freelance writer based in Palo Alto, CA.
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