Features
SCHOOL CIO: The Pros & Cons of Open-Source Products
4/1/2011 By:
By now School CIO readers know a lot about the benefits as well as the limitations
of using open-source products. It turns out that people can find just as many
reasons to fight open source as they can to implement it. So we decided to go
right to the source (pun intended) and ask some of our School CIO advisors about
their experiences and put an end to the debate.
Claim 1 Open source is way
too expensive. We
can’t afford to change everything!
The whole story: People who think
open source is prohibitively expensive
are looking only at the short term,
says Jim Klein, director of information
services and technology for Saugus
Union School District in California. With
respect to the initial transition, he says,
the price of making the switch can
be high; you have to think about the
long-term savings for it to make sense.
“For starters, add up the licensing fees
you’ll save. Just with that, open source
will cost a lot less over time.” Support
costs will decrease too. Klein no longer
hires an administrator to handle the
mail servers and file servers.
Over the past six years, Michigan
City Area Schools in Indiana has
invested heavily in open source. As
one of the districts involved in the
Indiana ACCESS program (www.doe.in.gov/olt/InACCESS/about_inaccess.html), it started a one-to-one initiative
by rolling out open-source desktops
in five classrooms and expanding to
29 classrooms by 2008. Because of
that success, when the district opened
a new school in January 2009 and
another that August, it went with open
source again.
“We saved $125,000 per building
by going with open source,” says
Kevin McGuire, director of instructional
technology. Here’s how: He bought
350 to 400 computers for each
school and saved $100 on hardware
for every machine, since Linux can
run on older computers. He saved an
additional $100 on software for each
machine, because he didn’t have to
buy Microsoft Windows or Office.
Like her counterparts in most of
the country, Karen Fuller, chief technology
officer for Klein Independent
School District in Texas, is trying to cut
costs. “In the past couple of years,” she
says, “anytime we had to upgrade or
buy new, we approached it by asking ‘What’s out there that’s open source
or shareware? Can we find something
that’s free instead of paying for maintenance
and licensing?’”
When Fuller needed imaging software,
she found the Linux-based Fog
(www.fogproject.org), which she uses
to image the desktops and laptops on
some of the district’s large one-to-one
campuses. “We were paying more than
$100,000 for our previous imaging
software, but with Fog we had to buy
only a couple of servers.”
Over the past two years, going with
open-source products has trimmed
Fuller’s budget by 15 percent. “Twenty
years ago, we wanted the best, the
most popular, and to do it right. Now
it’s like, ‘How can we do it right and
affordably?’ It doesn’t have to be a
name brand anymore.”
Claim 2 Our teachers won’t
use open-source software.
They are accustomed to the
products they already use.
The whole story: Can you say “Moodle” (moodle.org)? Thousands of
teachers use Moodle every day.
In fact, Intermediate District
287 in Minnesota has used it
for five years and is hosting it
in-house this year. The district
even boasts a Moodle expert,
who has created MoodleShare
(moodleshare.org), a site on
which teachers develop and
share Moodle courses, says
Chad Maxa, director of information
technology.
District 287 has also gotten
its teachers to use an opensource
bulletin board, called
phpBB (www.phpBB.com).
Teachers subscribe to forums
and chat rooms to discuss
everything from mobile learning
to standards. “It took a while for
teachers to adopt it, because
it’s a paradigm shift for them to
work together, but it’s a great
product and it’s gotten very
popular. We’ve been using it for
about a year,” Maxa says.
Change doesn’t come
easy, of course. When Coby
E. Culbertson tried to get his
staff to use OpenOffice, “it went
over like a lead balloon,” says
Culbertson, director of technology
at Western Dubuque
Community School District in Iowa.
His schools have classes that teach
students to use software with stepby-
step instructions created to work
with Microsoft Office, so no one was
willing to make the switch. “Hats off
to schools that got this off the ground,
but it didn’t work for us.”
Claim 3 There’s no tech support
for open source.
The whole story: Go online, McGuire
says. Just as the products themselves
are open, members of the opensource
community help one another
when necessary. “The nice thing
about open source is that with any
package, you can go to Google and
find a slew of people with a multitude
of solutions to your problems.” Also,
open-source consulting companies
are on the rise; McGuire uses one
called Révolution Linux (www.revolutionlinux.com).
Support is easy to come by, Jim
Klein at Saugus Union agrees. “The
open-source community continually
improves upon the software.” In
addition, some of the larger opensource
developers, including Red Hat
(redhat.com) and Novell (www.novell.com), have tech-support people on
staff.
Claim 4 The tech department
will have to learn a
new way of doing things.
The whole story: “We were going to
move to Windows Vista or go with
open source,” McGuire says. “The
learning curve to go with the opensource
operating system we chose was
a little greater, but there would’ve been
a learning curve for Vista as well. It was
a no-brainer for us.”
Open source is exciting for tech
staff, he says, because it expands
their knowledge and their options. He
believes that tech staff who complain
about learning something new are
doing themselves a disservice. “We
go home and read about new tech
and where we’re headed and don’t
think twice about it.” And incidentally,
Klein points out, the money you save
by choosing open source can go into
training your staff.
Claim 5 Open-source products
aren’t as good as
their mainstream counterparts.
The whole story: This belief is
McGuire’s biggest challenge. “When
we put an open-source solution out
there, it takes on a reputation that it’s
not as good as a paid product.” When
he tells teachers it’s open source,
their first reaction is often negative
(“Oh, great, here we go again”). All
the open-source products he’s given
them, however, have worked out
fine. For instance, when his teachers
wanted to do audio editing, he found
a package called Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net). At first everyone
complained. Now they use it all the
time and would be furious if it went
away, he says.
These days McGuire just tells
people, “Here’s a solution” and leaves
out the open-source part. Still, he
knows that open source isn’t always
the best fit. “We won’t see Ubuntu
[an open-source operating system] in
AutoCAD, and we still have Macs in the
art classrooms,” he says. “But for the
90 percent of our machines that are
used for word processing and Internet
browsing, there’s no need for top-ofthe-
line hardware and costly software.”
Claim 6 But no one uses
Open–Office! Our students
and teachers will learn useless
software.
The whole story: Klein hears this
complaint all the time. His rebuttal?
“Skills transfer. If you teach people
to use OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org), they’ll know how to use Microsoft
Office. Besides, each version of
Microsoft Office changes, so you
have to learn each one all over again.”
When Microsoft upgrades Office, the
file format changes, but when Klein
installed OpenOffice, there were no
problems with opening documents.
Another huge benefit is that it’s free,
so it can be installed on everything,
including home computers.
Chad Maxa also tells his Minnesota
district that it’s about teaching the
skills, not the product. In addition,
the money he saves by not buying
Microsoft Office is put into other
tools teachers want, including tablet
PCs, document cameras, and 60-inch
plasma screens. “These are the carrots
we can offer,” he says.
Claim 7 There aren’t any opensource
administrative
or management products.
The whole story: McGuire hears a
lot of people say that open source
lacks image-management products,
but that’s not true, he says. “I don’t
know any network administrator who
resorts to boxed products anymore.
For network management, there’s a
whole lot of open-source solutions.”
Claim 8 We’re about to launch
a one-to-one program.
We can’t do that and go with open
source.
The whole story: Talk to Klein. His
one-to-one SWATTEC program (goo.gl/2OkT) includes Linux on 2,500
netbooks and an open-source social
networking and media platform. “We
have built a system that makes oneto-
one practical and manageable for
schools,” he says, “and have shared
the software and program with dozens
of districts across the country that
replicate our program on thousands
and thousands of netbooks.”