[plug] Schools [taken] out today?

[Craig Ringer]

> Your email points out that Linux and related systems are 'free' - from our
> perspective 'free' is not quite correct.  As I stated, the majority of
> agencies in Queensland are existing Microsoft users.  The costs of going to
> a Linux platform would be prohibitive, based on software and systems
> transition, hardware compatibility and infrastructure changes to Government.

He has an honestly good point. Linux is free, using it is not. I think
the hardware compat argument is iffy, but retraining, infrastructure
(some stuff might need to change) etc is fair enough.

I think its best introduced in new installations, espectially things
like fileservers, mailservers, shared "guest" terminals, etc. Asking an
entire gov't dept to change over all at once... it is not going to
happen until they have sysadmins who're familiar with the system, etc. 

Also in about a year (hopefully) when openoffice is properly tested and
debugged. I wouldn't ask anybody to use it for real work who wasn't a
tech pro yet. I had to do a label print run the other day and it was
_not_ fun. OTOH MS word wouldn't do it at all w/o access *grin*.

-- 
|  Craig Ringer
|  IT Manager, POST Newspapers
|  http://www.postnewspapers.com.au/
|  --If it ain't broke, add features 'till it is
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