There is no doubt from time-to-time that discussions on this forum touch on the use of proprietary and open source software and there are some good points made on both sides. Anyone who follows any of my amblings will know that I have concerns about education, which is largely public funded (in the UK anyway), being dominated and tied into one or a small number of mega suppliers. I don't want to criticise the products but the situation whereby increasingly educational establishments have shackled their carts so closely to one supplier or even system they are now effectively trapped.
A good example is the Asus EEE, which comes with its own open source operating system. Anyone with a reasonable amount of IT experience should be able to use it 'out of the box' but so many educational establishments are rejecting it unless it has a certain proprietary OS added. The addition of this OS increases the unit cost and thus burden on the tax payer. It is of course a legitimate argument that a new OS will be a 'cost' on the IT systems staff in terms of training but as I stated earlier the EEE is pretty simple out of the box, so anyone who has difficulty with it has IT training problems anyway.
The Web is rapidly moving away for OS dominated systems and increasingly web applications are available on any browser and any OS. One example is Google Docs, which gives most of the office functionality you will ever need. There are countless others, most of which are free at a basic level.
Also, increasingly we see a world in which our transactions are dominated by the web. And the web is increasingly dominated by flexible integrated development not monolithic proprietary systems. Those being educated now will have to operate in this new world. So another concern of mine is that students are not being taught the flexibility they need to operate in the 21st Century web world as at the moment it seems to me education is lingering in a land where there is one OS to rule them all... (you know the rest
I am not against proprietary systems. Different systems have different cost and recuperation models. (Maybe another time I'll post about the concerns of the Open Source consultancy model!). But am I concerned that education is too closely tied to one way of doing things and that is bad for the funders (i.e. use the Taxpayers) and bad for the students since they are not learning how to be flexible and adaptable in skills application and boy are they/we all going to need it!
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