[Fsfe-uk] education sector

[Martin WHEELER]

On Mon, 1 Jul 2002, Tom Weiss wrote:

> With specific regard to the education sector, I think that cost is
> always a massive consideration because they perceive themselves to be
> underfunded and stretched to achieve what they need on their budgets.

HOWEVER -- take care not to run into the case of the middle-aged Head
of IT cautiously navigating towards retirement, who has just let the
establishment in for massive licensing fees for M$ products; and is
terrified of being made to appear out-of-date and ignorant of
cost-saving benefits s/he should have passed on to the school/College.
Add to this a total ignorance and irrational paranoid fear of all things
Unix ("Oh, God!  I'm too old to re-train!  I'm going to lose my job!"),
and you have the makings of total rejection of GNU/Linux out of hand.
Pig ignorance and fear will always win out over commercial commonsense
in this scenario.

(I once lost a job because of this.  The fear was so great, I was
accused of bringing "illegal hacking tools" onto the college campus.
I was teaching a sysadmin course, and using Debian to demonstrate how
to set up user accounts -- "forbidden knowledge"!)

You will be amazed at just how hard and dirty this animal will fight --
particularly in the UK education sector, where perception of non-M$
products is virtually nil, and a virtual state of war usually exists
between ICT support staff and knowledgeable students with a copy of
Tom's Root/Boot in their shirt pocket.  (This sort of situation does not
help the reputation of restriction-free software one little bit, btw.)

The exchange student who pointed out that the UK is way behind
continental Europe in Linux takeup is quite right.  In this country,
those who know anything at all about restriction-free software form a
small, hermetic group whose real contact with public-sector IT users is
absolutely minimal.

It is up to us to change this.


> cost, risk, and the quality of service you can provide are
> likely to be much more forceful.

 ... as long as you don't come over as knowing more than they do about
what's good for their institution ...

msw
-- 
   "...half of them aren't there to see the music anyway; all they
   really want to do is take drugs in a field, and there's certainly no
   shortage of fields in Somerset..."                 -- Richard Brooks