Canadian academia and open source

[ted leslie]

Very true,
its common for a person at a school board to receive a nice portable (for home use, and oddly enough
never documented :)   )
by the supplier of all this over-price Microshaft stuff.
In a Opensource environment, it is very hard to  grease the
the buyers. Even if they bought linux and staroffice, of course the margins are not there
to leave behind a 5K$ portable in the car of the customer after the lunch meeting
(which of course was a very expensive lunch  and pay for by the supplier :)   )
Now if the schools bought HW and opensource deployment from a single entity
then the school board wouldn't have to fear losing their greasing (as much).
Being a supplier, I have often found that the subtle hints for greasing also
happen over time, sometime even two years, before you are greasing at the 2-5% level.
So a change of supplier, then involves some time to establish a re-greasing environment.


-tl

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005 11:49:25 -0400 (EDT)
phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:

> 
> In a beaucratic environment, the need to protec. one's rear end outweighs
> any possible advantage in saving money, especially saving someone else's
> money. And one way to protect one's rear is to buy from an established
> source, regardless of the quality of the product.
> 
> I had this argument in spades back in the 80's when I was trying to
> persuade my university to buy Sun workstations instead of some brain-dead
> IBM terminals. The IBM equipment was 4 times the price for essentially
> zero capability. They bought IBM and the things were being turfed out a
> year later, replaced by guess what? Sun workstations.
> 
> Now Sun is the establishment and the place is full of Sun workstations.
> 
> And the school boards are intensely beaurcratic.
> 
> Peter
> 
> > James Knott <james.knott-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> said:
> >
> >> kburtch-Zd07PnzKK1IAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> >> > At May's PegaSoft dinner meeting, Libeaucratic nux in schools (not
> universities)
> >> was
> >> > discussed:
> >> >
> >> > "There has been a significant interest in Linux in schools,
> >> particularly
> > in the
> >> > UK.  The problem with bringing Linux into schools in Canada is that
> >> schools
> >> > here have established agendas, hierarchies and large budgets.  There
> >> needs to
> >> > be spending cuts to education in order to generate interest in Linux.
> >> Schools
> >> > in the UK have smaller budgets making Linux more attractive."
> >> >
> >> > http://www.pegasoft.ca/minutes/may_2005.html
> >>
> >> I guess you missed this.
> >>
> >> <http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2004-05/sunflash.20040527.1.html>
> >
> > No, it was discussed.  I believe the opinions were that they were buying a
> > commercial product (StarOffice) not OpenOffice.  The point was that the
> > heavily funded and beaucratic school boards in Ontario will always buy the
> > commerical software and most of them are heavily biased against installing
> > Linux or using open source because they don't care about price--they can
> > always pass the cost back to the government.
> >
> > This is compared to the UK where the school board are run differently and
> > Linux and open source are more attractive options and meeting with much
> > success.
> >
> > KB
> >
> > --
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Peter Hiscocks
> Professor Emeritus,
> Electrical and Computer Engineering,
> Ryerson University
> 416-465-3006
> www.ee.ryerson.ca/~phiscock
> 
> --
> The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
> TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
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> 
> 
--
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