I have seen MacOS (pre and post-X), several versions of that other OS and GNU/Linux used in schools. The stability and managability of GNU/Linux is a huge plus in the calculations to choose an OS. So are its low cost. From an educational standpoint the openness of GNU/Linux is ideal. Students can be given machines to install, configure, and create or modify software that is a part of the system without any further licensing. The others have never been stable where I have worked. I was at one place where a specialist in MacOS flew in and had the system working perfectly in an hour but several hours after he left no one could print again except from my GNU/Linux systems. That other OS is a haven for malware which is the signature of unreliability. If you cannot rely on software to keep working, why use it?

No. GNU/Linux is the clear choice for me. Here is an article written by one who shares my views. He describes use of GNU/Linux in schools in British Columbia, Canada. Wherever cost-effective performance is wanted GNU/Linux should be the first choice. I cannot imagine a more appropriate situation than schools. Students and staff need reliable IT and students need IT that is transparent and affordable to them so they can tinker as needed. Students learn by doing. They do not learn by doing what M$ wants them to do.

A teachable moment with GNU/Linux happened in my classroom yesterday. My students have seen the inner workings of a PC, installed GNU/Linux and used GNU/Linux since school began. Yesterday I showed a video from Youtube of a guy assembling a PC from parts. Students critiqued the performance because they had some exposure to the technology being displayed. Several noticed sloppy use of terminology and poor technique for handling and inserting parts. One thing they had not seen was the installation of “7″. While my students had done most of the work except some downloads in 20 minutes installing GNU/Linux, the presenter paused the camera for “several hours”. The class had quite a laugh at that. Several have used “7″ and see nothing there that they cannot obtain for a lot less time and money with GNU/Linux. They are empowered to make their own choices now.

GNU/Linux belongs in schools. It works for students and teachers.

Dana Blankenhorn knows a thing or two about IT but this is just wrong:
“The chasm is that point in the “s” curve where a product is known and liked by experts or aficionados, poised on the brink of mass market success or failure. Most products fall in. Why do some cross and others don’t? That’s Moore’s study.

Important examples are to be found in the world of open source. Linux crossed the chasm on servers. It failed to do so on desktops. Yet Android, a Google-developed Linux distro, seems fated to succeed.”

He presumes GNU/Linux has failed to cross some imaginary barrier when that is not the case. GNU/Linux on the desktop has long ago ceased to be a geek/early-adopter thing. It is being accepted on the mainstream/mom and pop desktop now. That started happening with the netbook. Many millions of netbook users are not geeks and don’t know an OS from an application. They know GNU/Linux works and love it. OEMs have passed up that opportunity in some ways but consumers have not. They have bought GNU/Linux whenever and wherever it has been offered. The news that Lenovo sold a million Ubuntu boxes last year was a surprise to many. How many geeks are there, 1% of users or maybe a few %? Geeks might buy 3 million PCs a year globally but tens of millions of GNU/Linux boxes are being sold, way more than geeks can absorb.

Further, there is all kinds of evidence that consumption of GNU/Linux is increasing:

• adoption in schools, and governments (not early adopters, for sure)
• huge numbers of mirrors with high volumes needed to ship distros
• Ubuntu breaking even and entering expanding lines of business
• continued growth for RedHat and Suse and it’s not all on the server
• mirror stats showing 150 megabits/s – 450 active requests average e.g. http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/stats

There are hundreds of mirrors for Debian GNU/Linux around the globe. FLOSS mirrors put a major load on the web. One mirror might service hundreds of thousands of clients in a year meaning more than 10 million clients run GNU/Linux. Then there are places that have internal mirrors we do not see.

GNU/Linux crossed the desktop chasm years ago, probably 2007 was the point, when ASUS put it on the eeePC. I think 2009 was the year everyone except Dana Blankenhorn and amicus_curious caught onto the phenomenon.

I am fortunate. My IT is straight forward. I set up GNU/Linux servers and GNU/Linux desktops and everyone (almost) is happy. It works reliably and I don’t need to fix much. Others have a more challenging task. Leaving the servers GNU/Linux and migrating the desktops to the next version of that other OS did not work for them. Perhaps eventually they will be able to make the desktops GNU/Linux and life will be easier. If you read the comments, you will find others did.

The thing I notice in the article is that there was nothing technically wrong with using GNU/Linux desktops. It’s just push-back from users. If you get them on your side, you are laughing. It’s easy:

• Give them something new with the migration: mouse/keyboards/monitors/client and you have won half the battle.
• Make the new system twice as fast as the old system. That is trivial with thin clients on a good network with able servers (SCSI, tons of RAM, RAID, gigabit/s). For us, GNU/Linux on the desktop was much faster than XP on the same machines.
• Hold their hands a bit. For most users I have seen, show them a typical session and give them the opportunity to try it in a lab surrounded by their peers. They will figure things out and help each other.
• Get the bosses to try it out first. If you don’t convince the bosses, the ordinary user is a lot more difficult.

If there is some task or some user for whom GNU/Linux does not work, so be it. Let them keep their island and hope they move on one way or another. In my place, I have only two teachers still using XP. It’s not worth the fight if they are set in their ways. Eventually their role will change or turnover will fix that problem. End of life of XP may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back or it may be malware. Time is on your side.

Oracle and the properties it purchased with SUN Microsystems are evolving. OpenOffice.org is being replaced by LibreOffice and the Document Foundation. No word yet on whether or not Oracle will be participating. They let OpenSolaris wither. They may do the same with OpenOffice.org.

see http://www.documentfoundation.org/

There may be a dull year or two in FLOSS but no dull decades… Growth and change happen.

Try out the fork here: http://www.documentfoundation.org/download/

There are issues as can be expected: en-US only for now etc.

Debian Squeeze has OpenOffice.org3. I doubt there is any way the new fork will be ready or accepted in time for the release.

OpenOffice.org has been the killer app for GNU/Linux in schools. The savings on licences for Office alone can justify migrating to GNU/Linux. As Oracle seem not particularly friendly/responsive to FLOSS, this fork may have been inevitable or just a good thing on its own. This action may briefly distrub development but I see a bright future for the software in GNU/Linux.

UPDATE Here is a comment by Mark Shuttleworth.
“Office productivity software is a critical component of the free software desktop, and the Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu. The Document Foundation’s stewardship of LibreOffice provides Ubuntu developers an effective forum for collaboration around the code that makes Ubuntu an effective solution for the desktop in office environments”

See that and others on the “Supporters List”.

A decent review of anti-trust actions against M$ and M$’s fight against competition around the world is on Ars Technica. For those too young to remember or too busy to be engaged, there is a good outline of events from the legal side. If you have time, please read the documents on US DOJ v M$. They will change the way you think of M$. They did so many things to mess with competition instead of making a good product. There is just no other way to view merging the browser with the OS. It wasn’t an application. They made it a necessary component of the OS and they claimed it could not be removed. That was just the tip of the iceberg. Read how they threatened major OEMs with higher prices or no right to distribute the software.

This was all too little and too late. M$ got a solid monopoly that it wanted and a decade or more of obscene profits rolled in. The “final agreement” can be seen as a rubber-stamp of acceptability on the monopoly even though it was illegally gained. M$ was not punished in any way, just told not to do it again. That might work for an innocent child but M$ is a brutal tyranny, ruled from the top down by evil men anxious to enslave the world. If you consider that M$ rakes in tens of $billions annually and the product is basically copies of documents/CDs/permissions the world really has been working for M$ and not the other way around. They have created something worth a few $billion and have arranged to be paid repeatedly for every PC sold. They even force people who use thin clients to pay multiple times for a licence just for connecting to the PC or server running their software. They do nothing to earn that money. The world has been working for M$.

It is past time to free the world of this evil. Use Free Software. Use GNU/Linux, or FreeBSD, or OpenSolaris, anything but that other OS that does not even have a legitimate name. If the courts refuse to see the light, what is your excuse? Be free. Don’t buy any of M$’s products. Find out what you have been missing. I saw the light 10 years ago. PCs that refused to work reliably danced. Students had good use of IT in the classroom. I became a magician in the classroom. Today I had standing room only in my lab as students thrilled at the performance of all their applications running on one PC that would have laboured to please one user with that other OS (and restricts the number who may even try by the EULA). Be free.

UPDATE At the end of an article linked from the one mentioned above, ARS Technica reported in July 2010 that only 63% of their visitors used that other OS and 6% used GNU/Linux. Clearly, they have different visitors than NetApplications counts. ARS shows 26% use MacOS although Apple says they produce only about 3% of PCs.