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Oct. 21, 2009

A little over six years ago, Helmuth Peer, a math teacher at the Weiz secondary school in Austria decided that it was time to migrate the schools' IT system to a new platform, and that would be easy to set up, easy to maintain and especially very easy to connect via a wireless network.

Together with his students, which he involved in the project, he searched for a solution that would allow for customization and that would simply correspond to the needs of each school level concerned.

He also discovered that the Linux distribution openSUSE 11.1 would qualify as a suitable solution, and building a system on this basis seemed sustainable in the near future and that would be the right choice both for him and the school.

So the team started developing what was to be called the 'desktop4education' for the school's workstations and a server version they named 'server4education'.

Once the project grew and matured, the Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture became aware of it and realized its great potential for other schools throughout Austria.

The Ministry's IT department, under the direction of Robert Kristoefl, consequently started to support the open source project by dispatching around 2,000 CDs and DVDs to other Austrian schools.

Although the new system is working very well and doesn't require any type of licensing fees due to the use of free and open source software, many schools are still reluctant to use the solution, as they prefer to opt for proprietary software solutions such as Microsoft and a few others.

But the situation now is about to change as the Federal government increasingly adopts a policy that promotes the use of open source software in all Austrian schools.

Exemplary to this is the government's decision to pay any school €10 for each workstation that runs the free productivity suite Open Office that is provided by Sun Microsystems to replace its competing proprietary product, Microsoft Office, for which the government introduced a calculative license fee of €10.

Though the schools opting for Microsoft Office still do not pay the full amount of the license, this policy still creates a give-or-get framework which clearly illustrates the schools are at a financial loss or reward.

With further political steps in this direction on the one hand and decreasing regional budgets on another, an increasing number of schools are about to realize the great potential of educational Linux distributions as desktop4education.

Another great new initiative is the related Linux Advanced project, which is a similar program focused on an easy to use live booting operating system for students.

The desktop4education solution has seen to be not only an economical viable alternative to proprietary IT solutions, but also as an alternative of equal quality.

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Source: LNT.

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