In light of the recent delays of Microsoft Vista, I have to ask…why pay for the operating system in the first place? The reason Microsoft is good is due to marketing and it’s generaly ubiquity in the market. It’s the product that people are most familiar with. People don’t know, aren’t familiar with Mac OS, or are just scared of change. For the normal user, change is not good. If they have to alter their tried and true routines, it’s going to inevitably lead to frustrations and mess everything up. And what about Linux? Forget about it. The average person doesn’t have a clue what it is, or what they can do with it…all for free I might add.
Let’s say for example a small public school in the city has 1,000 students. And for those 1,000 students they have 100 computers in the computer lab. To purchase Windows XP Home SP2 now it costs about $100 per license, but I’m sure there’s an educational discount, so let’s ballpark it at $60 to be conservative. $60×100 computers = $6,000. Now these computers probably aren’t only for surfing the web or playing solitaire, some office productivity software is going to be needed, so by default that usually means MS Office, which can be had at an educational discount of about $120. So, that’s an additional 100 x $120 = $12,000. Now we’re at $18,000 just for the computer software.
Now I don’t have an estimate on the number of public schools there are in a city like DC, San Francisco, or New York, but I would guess it’s a lot. Maybe 100, 200, 300…point is, we’re talking a lot of money. The sole beneficiary of this is Microsoft, and they’re going to do everything in their power to make this sale to reap a few million extra dollars in revenue. Even at steep discounts, a procurement of this magnitude nets them millions.
What I don’t understand is, why don’t school save this money and use free, open-source alternatives available to them? Edubuntu is the Ubuntu Linux distribution that’s geared towards educational institutions…and it’s completely free. It’s a fully functional and extremely stable operating environment that to the untrained eye, operates just like any Windows or Mac desktop environment should.
Now with all this saved money not being spent of software, maybe the public schools can put their money to better uses like paying teachers more, or endowing scholarships to send kids to college.