Webs’ Random Ideas

Another school in news for making the switch to Open Source, this time in New Zealand…

Albany Senior High School in the northern suburbs of Auckland has been running an entirely open source infrastructure since it opened in 2009. The 230-pupil school was set up to follow open learning principles, offering large “learning commons” areas where multiple classes interact rather than conventional classrooms and setting aside one day each week for pupils to work on self-driven research projects.

Ditching Microsoft is highly unusual within the NZ education sector, as a long-standing contract with the national government means the software giant is paid for technology for the school even though none has been used. Microsoft’s dominance also means that most planning documents for education presume an Microsoft infrastructure.

The whole article is just a fascinating read! Not just about the school making the switch but MS’s dominance in the computer market and their ingenious marketing to get themselves so intertwined in school districts (which is smart on many levels for MS).

I also liked how the principle stated his server room in the school was built to common practice standards for schools of that size and enrollment, which was 4 racks. Each rack able to hold 48 servers or 24 2U servers. Yet the school only needed 4 servers to run the whole school on an open source system.

I’ve written about this before so it comes to little surprise to me to read about this again. What does surprise me though is how these stories still seem to be few and far between. I’m still confident the Open Source model will win out as free software that works great (in many ways better than the paid version, think archiving programs, Internet browsers, antivirus, or file transfer clients) is hard to pass up. Heck even my company is finally starting to adopt OSS.