Toolkit

Story: Linux taken for a ride in the Old West

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If only their attitude would be considered in my locale!

I am a K12LTSP supporter and user in a large school system, thus I have learned a lot about how local governments work here in the USA. I would *love* to see K12LTSP in every school in my district. But, sadly, I won't anytime soon. It is unfortunate that the prime consideration in the minds of decision-makers is "we don't have the money for the 'real' product, so let's try out the open source toy." Then, and only then, do they discover, as this article describes very nicely, that the "open source toy" is actually a heck of a functional tool. For example, my county is filthy rich. Thus, it happily sends millions of US dollars to Redmond every year. The reason? When the system blows up (and it has several times--I mean our entire Craptive Directory here), then the decision makers can say, "Oh, but everyone uses Microsoft, it's not our fault, don't fire us for using the 'industry standard'!"

This attitude is, as you Brits say, bullox (sp?).

Free/Open Source software (FOSS) is a matter of freedom. *That* is why the software is so stable; we have the *freedom* to improve it. It's also why costs are so low with FOSS. All of these benefits come from the freedom that comes with FOSS. This is why Microsoft is fighting so desparately and hard to somehow stop Massachusetts from mandating the OpenDocument file formats.

User freedom equals user power, as this article shows. The City of Largo, in the state of Florida (USA), is another wonderful example of this.

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