This post comes hard on the heels of an important piece of news... at least one Open Source company has become part of the Becta's official list of suppliers to the education sector. The new procurement frame work under the aegis of the OGC relaunches the supply of ICT to education. The emphasis is clear: deliver value for money to UK schools.

It was not long ago that most commentators believed an Open Source company would join the likes of Capita, Serco and RM shortly after hell froze over. But times do change. In this case the driving force for change seems to be (we presume) the well-known cost-benefit values of Linux and other Open Source software.

It's the Economy Stupid

As usual it's all about money. The Open Source community has always advocated that schools in the UK adopted Free Open Source Software (FOSS) on the grounds that there were considerable cost savings to be had which would directly benefit schools and the taxpayer alike.

As long ago as 2005 a report from Becta strongly supported this assertion. However this was a time when huge amounts of a cash-rich Government's money were being poured into developing school ICT and value for money was not really on the agenda. As a result the incumbent proprietary vendors enjoyed a feeding frenzy and Open Source solutions were ignored. Indeed it was impossible, despite persistent lobbying, to get an Open Source company on the official school suppliers list. As I said, how times change. If we revisit school's ICT finances 2008 we see a different picture.

If you are a school fund-holder you can forget about long-gone ring-fenced ICT funding and generous e-learning credits; forget about BSF grants; forget about the massive refurbishment 'refresh' monies and try not to think about the few super-rich Academies. The UK Gov has run out of money for the continual 'improvements' in school ICT, and an impending recession is hardly likely to restore the coffers, but, and this comes as no surprise, it hasn't run out of ambition.

Given that there are no monies waiting to be showered on school ICT projects from the Treasury, then there are only two ways of funding government plans for ICT in schools now. These are: donations from a generous philanthropic third party multinational software giants or try to wrestle it back from the schools to whom the money has been devolved (and being no longer ring fenced could be spent on crayons if they liked).

The former route, the philanthropic donor, involves, the cynics may say, attempts to sell a slow selling operating system to new generation of children via several well publicised 'access' initiatives this year.

Indeed, the source of the funds for this week's announcement that all poor children will be given £700 to buy themselves a computer with broadband access is not clear. It may well be Treasury (ie taxpayers) money but it is rumoured to be 'philanthropic' in its origination. In any case, the generosity of putative donors is not the thesis of this article. What concerns me is the attempt to claw back devolved money from schools to support a model of ICT which is unsustainable and unsuitable for school's needs.

Yes, schools have all the money now; the budget was devolved to while ago, but unfortunately the Government wants it back to fund their grandiose schemes.

Enter the IT Managed Service Agreements. If you are a school Finance Officer and for some reason you are reading this article the mere mention of the phrase Managed Service Agreement (sorry I said it again) will cause you to reach for the sedative bottle. To cut to the chase, you should find that your IT budget has just gone up by a factor of two or three. If you are a Secondary School put aside a cool £300,000 to have your IT run by the LA in companion with your local friendly outsourcing giant who will decide what kit you use and what software you can have. If you thought Microsoft was good at locking you in you have seen nothing yet.

Forget any freedom to allocate resources as you think would meet the needs of you students, any money you have spare may just fund the electricity needed to run the latest behemoth computers; pay the software licence-fees or the wages of the small army of technicians needed to keep it all going.

How to hold two contradictory positions at once

Becta said it loudly nearly two years ago and they were right - the level of funding required by UK current ICT structures is unsustainable.

They weren't kidding then and as we prepare to hit the walls of a recession they sure are not kidding now. Moreover the cost of bidding for BSF and the squeeze on margins has caused the major UK ICT vendor to issue a profit warning. Schools can't afford to pay, the Government can't afford to pay and even the vendors are barely making a profit. Yet LA's are issuing compulsory 'refresh' agreements to state schools forcing them to spend on new ICT equipment and effectively coercing them into expensively outsourcing their ICT.

Forgive me for stating the obvious. The worms will at some point collectively turn. Will state schools be able to file for bankruptcy? There's a thought! In any case there will be a crisis just after a lot of taxpayer's money has been spent/wasted on a model of ICT in schools that is too costly, too slow, too complicated and too restrictive.

Let's call it the Computing-Crunch.

The 'model' in question was driven by the upgrade cycle, proprietary software and an administrative obsession with mega databases.

ICT in the classroom, as used for education, is (or rather should be) a completely different animal to ICT used by LA's and Administrators to control monitor and generally remove citizen's rights. Now I don't for one minute think the public funded schools can fight 'big brother' nor would I advocate rebellion (I do think it is a shame they should have to pay for it themselves... bit like being made to dig your own grave), but to inflict an inappropriate corporate style computing model on the education of our students is unforgivable and stupidly wasteful.

So far so depressing, but schools still have some wriggle room.

I would suggest that schools put aside a little cash labelled 'ICT money I will use for Education' and then change to a new Open Source paradigm for the classroom. Let the mega database driven school-admin-LA-Gov project fail under its own weight and forget about it.

A Simpler Model

A step-by-step approach to reinventing ICT.

Before we start out on this particular tack one sentence on why it needs re-inventing. In case no one has noticed school ICT (GCSE et al) is a boring old fossil; anyone for groovy old 'desktop publishing' or maybe a cool 'PowerPoint' presentation?

Note the brand name of MSPowerPoint as a synonym for presentation software...a bit like 'Hoover' for 'vacuum cleaner' but marginally less exciting.

So out with the old and on with the 21st Century.

Step 1: Make sure you have a good, speedy filtered Internet connection. This is one thing you, the LA and the Government are keen on; all for different motives. If your LA is dragging its feet due to cost, tell them that is much cheaper to go for an Open Source solution.

Step 2: Get the teaching and learning materials you have the copyright to use digitised and stored somewhere. For example, e-text books provided by publishers, school worksheets and DVDs. You will need a couple of terrabytes for all those videos. A Linux solution will cost the least (<£2000) and make sure you have a an effective way of searching for things. Choice here is Silverlight (Microsoft only), GoogleDesktop (freeware), Beagle (Free Open Source).

Step 3: Set up some information servers. These are essentially web servers which incorporate a virtual learning environment and optionally a wireless access point. Using free Open Source software (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP-Moodle) the DIY price will be under £1000 each. Place them strategically. Give them access to the outside world if you wish to work from home. The information server will access the educational materials stored on the storage server.

Step 4: Setup some terminal servers: One server will 'do' 25 clients. The terminal server is there to provide a consistent school desktop when for teaching purposes you require all the students to have the same application in front of them. Use Linux Terminal Server as this is a free Open Source Software. Again the DIY price is under £1000. If you want to save on hardware and energy costs then in Step 3 specify the server a little higher and using Xen (the free Open Source virualisation hypervisor) install two OSes on the server one for the web server then another for the terminal server!

Step 5: Save time and energy. Rip the hard drives out of your existing PCs and set them to PXE boot to the Terminal Server. For ultra-quick boot up replace the motherboads with fast boot boards (5-10 secs from cold) which incorporate an embedded Linux OS.

Step 6: Turn off the photocopiers and printers.

Now, as a school you have "done your bit" as it were. Your school is now an electronic source of educational materials. You have an entire pedagogic infrastructure, which for a secondary school of 1000 students would cost (assuming DIY) well under £30,000 using Open Source products.

All we have to do now is to access this stuff.

Back to Netbooks

The explosion of low cost so called netbooks brings PCs into the accessibility bracket of iPODs. It seems (to me) that it is not unreasonable to make them personal learning access devices and the property of the student (along with conventional laptops). I know, not everyone can afford a £100 computer, but that is exactly the kind of thing that the state can intervene in to support with grants and loans. So let's leave this to one side or I will have to stop writing here or alternatively I could point out that if you actually carried out steps 5 and 6 you would be able to afford them yourselves.

The students can have whatever they like on their computers, they own them after all. They can access school materials by using them as e-books, or web browsers, (they could be running Google Chrome and web apps) or as VLE clients; anything at all. If you need big keyboards and screens don't forget all the old kit you still have with just that.

They all have wireless access and the school has wireless access points.

If you are desperate for a conventional ICT lesson where all learn to use, say, a spreadsheet (i.e. the very-same-spread-sheet for teaching purposes) you can either PXE boot to the terminal server or boot from a USB stick/cf flash card containing a super-fast standard school-linux distro (sys admins heaven). There is a lot in this sentence, more than one Windows school sysadmin has approved it.

Such an approach will I believe de-restrict ICT in school and unleash the creative power of ICT in education once again. No really it will. When was the last time you saw something different on the ICT suite? Once IT (as it was known) was the hotbed of innovation in schools, admired and feared in equal measure by more pedestrian subjects.

Leave the conventional network room behind, in fact shut it completely and turn off the air con. Leave the computers with their never-changing fossilised desktops and weary set of applications. Smell the coffee and chose freedom (ok in just one small part of the school).

Conclusion

Please pick holes in the master plan above, maybe suggest some improvements but thanks to BECTA's change of heart you can now get your Open Source software straight from the OGC Web Portal from Gov approved suppliers.

The summary is: Internet-Moodle-Netbooks.

So, schools, with what little money you have left, leave the admin bullies to their games. You can do little to stop them, and set off with your students in a new direction. At least we will have some fun and with free, Open Source software no one can stop you!

We are in an economic downturn, perhaps even a full-blown recession. Any doubts I had about that were removed by two related, recent phenomena.

The first is that whenever I walk down a high street I see almost every single retailer involved in near permanent 'sales'. Looking into the figures confirms the picture - sales on the high street have fallen for four of the past five months. The second is that high street retailers are now deep in conversations with Open Source companies. Some, like Specsavers, are so far into migrating to Open Source that they are essentially running on it end-to-end. Retail's economic challenges will soon be everyone's.

We all know that with profit margins of 10% it takes £10 of sales to generate £1 of profit. As sales continue to fall, even those in the relatively comfortable position of 10% profit margins have to look everywhere they can to cut costs - every £1 saved goes straight on the bottom line, and can make the difference between business survival or business failure.

In these circumstances the IT budget is one of the first places to come under scrutiny, and most IT departments are coming under increasing pressure to save every penny. And there is a particular lack of grace to the position the IT department finds itself in - not only is it's own budget falling, but the proprietary vendors with which it deals need to ensure their own survival during a recession, and I'll let you imagine how flexible those providers will be in price negotiations if they are in a monopoly position and know you have no choice.

Open Source software has many virtues, but one above all others is suited to the current economic environment - it enables you to strategically cut costs more than any other IT tool available to you. When I say strategically, what I mean by that is simply this. There is an Open Source product that does the job of every single piece of software you are currently using in your business. You choose if you replace it, when you replace it, and how much of it you replace. What is elegant about this is that Open Source fits in so well with proprietary software you can leave the rest of your IT systems undisturbed. You can create a strategic migration plan that delivers consistent cost savings over any time period you choose.

There are two ways Open Source software cuts costs, directly and indirectly. It cuts costs directly by virtue of the fact that there are no licence fees associated with it, that is to say the software is freely available in perpetuity at zero cost. IT projects attract cost in three broad areas, hardware, software and know-how (whether internal staff costs or external consultancy, support or training costs). With Open Source you can remove an entire category of costs at a stroke.

It cuts costs indirectly in a number of ways, three of which we will briefly examine here.

1. The first is that Open Source extends your hardware budget. In terms of new hardware it does this by having a far lower resource requirement than alternative proprietary solutions. In terms of old hardware it does this by extending the lifetime of existing hardware.
2. The second is that Open Source drastically reduces the administration overhead on your staff. One, it 'just works' - Open Source systems are widely and justly lauded for incredible reliability and robustness once set up. Two, it is also justly famous for its resistance to viruses and other malware - a major time-sink in most IT departments. Three, it eliminates at a stroke the requirement to track licences for legal compliance and removes the threat of enforcement tactics from people like BSA, FAST and proprietary vendors.
3. Finally, Open Source in the mix at any organisation has some wonderful effects on the account management you are experiencing from your proprietary vendors. The first is that vendors attention on your account is revitalised in a way that nothing else seems able to do. The second is that prices will be held down and discounts offered in any situation where you are comparing the vendors products with Open Source (this happens much more where you are serious about Open Source, and are already running several Open Source systems).

In conclusion, Open Source software offers businesses a powerful strategic tool in their armoury to survive, perhaps prosper, in the economic downturn. Businesses of all sizes, from corner shops up to the largest high street retailers are turning to it strategically, and your business could benefit from it too.

Recently I attended a presentation given to all the major UK suppliers of ICT goods and services to schools. It was hosted by the Becta, the government quango responsible for the use of ICT in schools, and was all very worthy with a lot of talk about value for money and exhortations to encourage diversity, simplify supply lines and so on, but just one slide of the presentation did jerk me into life.

On it was a differentiation between proprietary software; free software and open source software. Naturally I asked the presenter for clarification of the terms as I was a little confused. He was unable to clarify beyond saying 'well, you know, for example Google Earth is free software and we would like to encourage schools to take advantage of this kind of (good) thing'.

Fair enough. Google Earth is a fine free application and never mind that it is proprietary software in the sense that all proprietary software is proprietary in as much as it is owned by someone and you dont know how they did it. Never mind either that open source software does not have to be supplied free (though much is of course) and that no one owns it and you can see how it was done from the code supplied with it.

These niceties are a little advanced yet for our Government friends.

No, what got me thinking was the whole thing about what is generically called 'freeware' (proprietary free software) and its use in schools.

I admit to using loads of the stuff and installing it on lots of friend's computers. Probably my most popular are the Google suite of goodies and AVG's free anti virus package. There are of course loads more, Opera, WinAmp, SpyBot, iTunes, Picasa spring to mind.

Little mini alarm bells however started ringing in my head quite recently (tinnitus?). We all know that in the freeware sector of the market 'revenue models' are oft discussed along the lines of 'how the hell do you make money from this stuff?'. With something like iTunes it is patently (no pun intended) obvious, less so say with Picasa.

An interesting 'journey-to-revenue' is provided by the story (ongoing) of Grisoft's AVG anti virus software for Windows. Being a long term AVG fan I have installed the free virus checker on (friends) Window boxes for many years. AVG now at version 8 still has a free version and very fine it is too; ok it's a little tricky for the non technical to now find the free alternative when automatically upgrading from 7.5, but it can be done, and if you wish to avail yourself of the extra features of the paid-for versions the prices are very reasonble.

However, when upgrading a tranche of older laptops I have run into problems. Upgrading them to Windows Service Pack 2 and installing more RAM onto 4 year old XP Home setups being a most time consuming activity. It comes as no surprise that a few owners simply decided to go to PC World and buy a new laptop thereby ensuring one more sale of increasingly stalled Vista!

Now of course AVG have every right to move to a paid for version of their excellent product and it makes sense to 'encourage' its userbase to upgrade their machines to a (more) secure operating system but the point is obvious; what is free today may well not be free tomorrow and if it is proprietary software and you are dependent on it you will have to stump up the cash.

If we now return to freeware in schools. Imagine that School A has saved itself a load of money and now only uses Netbooks rather than traditional PCs. They use free online applications for all their word processing, spreqdsheets, presentations, pictures, email and so on. They don't need expensive technicians, storage, applications or software licences and they can remodel their ICT paradigm accordingly.

Then one day, just when they have got used to this situation and integrated it into every conceivable scheme of work it becomes time to pay their dues. How much no one knows.

I do not need to labour this point and I'm not suggesting that there is any evil plot going on by freeware suppliers, I just wonder whether it is wise for the Government to encourage schools into a situation which may turn around and bite them hard, where it hurts most, in the pocket.

The solution is obvious. Schools can be encouraged to safely embrace free open source software otherwise known as FLOSS which stands for Free Libre Open Source Software. No one owns FLOSS so no one supplier can determine on what conditions it is supplied to schools or in what direction it develops.

This is the only way schools can cut costs and share in the collective 'ownership' of its vital resources.

So in conclusion, definitions do matter after all; quite a lot more than our cost-conscious presenter appeared to be aware. Maybe when truly there are FLOSS suppliers into the education market more will come to appreciate the point of this particular blog.