Sunday, January 13, 2008

Why schools should exclusively use free software

This article offers numerous reasons why schools should use free open source software. The one I think is most important is related to the money one, but in a way which has not been touched on.

The problem is that, as the article says, purchasing proprietary software (or receiving it for free) generally leaves the school system responsible for purchasing upgrades. Consider that most systems I've worked for have computers that are well past their expected hardware life. One system just upgraded its ancient computers from Windows 2000 to XP. Some of these machines did not take the upgrade gracefully. How much of that money could have gone to purchase of modest but new equipment?

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