Re:Schools Should Exclusively Use Free Software (2014)
by jcelerier on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @04:41PM
(#24486463)
> Whatever your school is/was using Microsoft for is not a $1M/year expense. It might not even be doable for $100M/year.
so how come the university i've been (Bordeaux, ~55k students / 3k staff) almost exclusively uses Linux and free software and does not have a computing budget in the hundred thousands ?
Re:Schools Should Exclusively Use Free Software (2014)
by smt88 on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @10:59AM
(#24493315)
You're refuting a point I did not make.
I was responding to someone who suggested that schools should build their own critical software. If there's a good FOSS option already, they should absolutely use it. But there isn't always that option.
Also, I guarantee that the school has at least 5-10 tech people, which means computing expenses are approaching $1M when you factor in benefits. Free software requires a larger in-house staff to customize and maintain it, even if the initial cost is low.
You have to spread the costs across multiple orgs and hundreds of programmers. You can do that by paying a centralized institution for proprietary software or by joining an open-source project.
If there is no open-source project, you have to create one, and then you're potentially years away from getting something that's a true alternative.
If schools don't like proprietary licenses, they should bargain together for something better.