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tom wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > I think we are missing some points here. Its all very well setting up > servers in schools but it not the server itself that the school is > looking for its a solution to a set of problems that exist in > educational establishments. > > The education market in the UK is very much controlled and dominated by > ScoMis, Captia One, RM and Microsoft. These companies run services in > the UK and are practically monopolies / cartels as far as UK Education > IT is concerned. > > The only School "Admin" products (not Schools IT Admin) that I am aware > of are FreeMis and schooltool (one of Mark Shuttleworth's babies) . > > These products will have very little impact unless someone with a lot of > money, power and influence comes in and shake things up big time. > > Even Becta blow hot and cold about GNU/Linux. Sure they want schools to > move to open source / free software BUT .... they don't know how to > facilitate this, preferring instead to use a commissioning model and > outsourcing the fact finding tasks to a third party (who equally have > not track record of education admin / use / support on the GNU/Linux > platform). > > As for the education software market. Again very much dominated by > Microsoft based products. Very few education software houses are > developing there products for the GNU/Linux platform. > > Its sad to see such inertia in the education system, however I don't > think personally that the GNU/Linux revolution will just happen. It will > take someone with talent, foresight, a lot of backing (in cash) and > tenacity to change the tide in the education software market. > > Lobbying might help too ;-) > > Tom. > Well you never know what might happen. I mean maybe Oracle might decide they want a piece of the pie although I guess they could use Solaris to do that. Mark Shuttleworth is also another person who could possibly fund something like this. But I guess it's unlikely. The way things are going though I wonder if in 10 years time everything will be on the net anyway. Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html