While schools have benefited from additional government funding to install computer networks, it is a longstanding bone of contention that there is no continuing budget for their maintenance, so that the inevitable bills must be met from existing funds. The British Educational Communications and Technology Association (Becta), funded by the Department for Education and
Skills, has published a study which suggests that schools could trim down computer costs significantly if they switched from proprietary to open source software (OSS). In OSS, the core computer code is freely accessible, so users are able to modify it to suit their school’s needs, and this expanding body of software remains unshackled from proprietary restrictions. The ‘Open Source Software in Schools’ project compared 15 schools using OSS with 33 schools using proprietary software to explore:
■ how OSS is being used;
■ the relative costs of the two types of software;
■ ways in which OSS can be implemented successfully
The 48 schools included ‘a range of schools in a variety of settings’, but the sample size is a rather small one from which to draw firm conclusions. Becta itself cautions that the schools were‘opportunity samples’, with the two sets not entirely equivalent in nature, only partial OSS provision in most of the OSS schools and considerable cost variations between them. Their assessments of the sets of OSS and non-OSS schools therefore give only a limited indication of what comparative costs are likely to be as a general rule. The 24-page report examined three areas – technical infrastructure (server and computer operating systems), administration and management, and curriculum software – and ultimately delivered a mixed judgment about what open source software can currently offer to schools.
Technical Infrastructure
Powys is one education authority that has adopted Linux as the system for all its schools’ servers, and other authorities are currently investigating the cost benefits. Costs are a central issue for all school network managers, and generally the ones in this study considered the use of open source operating systems for servers to be advantageous compared with non-open source systems as they offered:
■ lower costs;
■ greater reliability;
■ greater ease of use.
It is also possible for schools with multiple servers to trial OSS on one or more servers before moving on to full implementation Becta’s findings suggest that the adoption of OSS can generate significant economies in hardware and software for infrastructure implementation. Reduced costs were not the only benefit; in one large urban secondary school, Bectareported that: ‘The network manager feels that the transparency of OSS is more important than the cost saving, because he is able to adapt it to meet the school’s needs.’