February 17, 2010
Is Open Source Software Good For A Small School With Limited Funds?
You can’t really answer that with a single response unfortunately. Often the answer will be yes, but you do need to be careful for many of the reasons others have posted (frequency of updates, compatibility, amount of development, etc…). If you stick to the major open source software projects, you will generally have success. That’s not to say that a smaller open source can’t meet your needs though.
When using any open source software, keep in mind that just because it is open source, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have some restrictions. I’m guessing it won’t matter as much for a school, but where I work, including open source software does have some implications depending on the open source license (i.e. can it coexist with close source software or does my employer need to open source their software if integrated with it?).
Keep in mind when selecting hardware or software that many commercial vendors do offer educational discounts for their products. Weigh the cost of the admin staff and the training versus the savings by going with open source. You may find that a mix of commercial and open source works best for you.
On a personal note, I would love to see more schools consider open source software regardless of cost. A Linux OS plus OpenOffice and some of the Apache or SourceForge project applications makes for an interesting system. The county I live in actually had the public libraries all switch over to a Linux OS, OpenOffice, and Firefox for all their systems and most users seemed to handle it pretty well.
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Comments on Is Open Source Software Good For A Small School With Limited Funds? »
it is functional software… it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles the the pay software has. so yes.
To date I have yet to find a situation where commercial software was better if there was an open-source solution.
Hmm … maybe the MacOS user interface. Certainly nothing from Microsoft.
Go for it!
I think it’s a great idea. OpenOffice is great if you can’t afford MS Office. I would stay with Windows or Macs, though, unless someone at the school is tech savvy enough to use Linux.
It would certainly be a cheap way of providing ICT equipment. If you do go down this route make sure that at least one person (preferably yourself) can answer and troubleshoot any problems or queries that anyone at the school may have.
It is a good idea though. Why not go all the way and use Linux instead of Windows? (Make sure you can troubleshoot Linux yourself first though)
It depends on what type of software you mean. For operating systems, it would definately save you money, but there may be a lot of incompatibilities between the staff and students home PC’s, and the school ones, preventing you from being able to bring in files and that kind of thing. Also, if the computers are used for teaching students, keep in mind that although they will probably learn more about computers on an open-source platform, the information they learn may not serve them well when they move on to higher education (college, university etc) that have computers that operate on a windows or mac based network.
It would depend, if it is a software that is supported by a large group of programmers…then yes. Such as OPEN OFFICE, that will always be supported and has a big group of programmers working on it.
If the open source software is written by one “dude”, it might never be updated again!