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Our Blogs Open Sauce Bid to push FOSS in Australian secondary schools | Bid to push FOSS in Australian secondary schools |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 04 July 2008 | |
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The Australian Federal Government is currently caught in a bind over an election promise to supply public schools with one computer per secondary school child, with the cost of deployment now looking to be much beyond what was budgeted. Both software and running costs, mainly electricity bills, are to blame. At least one state, New South Wales, is seeking more money from the Federal Government to deploy the PCs. Another state, Victoria, has accepted that these additional costs will have to be borne from state funds. The group, representing a number of organisations and individuals associated with free and open source software, has written to the deputy prime minister Julia Gillard, who also happens to be education minister, pointing out that FOSS can play a role in bringing down the software costs for PCs deployed in schools. The letter said, in part: "Over the past two years we have seen a dramatic drop in price for basic computing hardware. Free and open source software represents a real opportunity for further cost savings, which would allow schools to use the $1000 per unit investment more flexibly and effectively. "Schools (and associated education authorities) concerned about the additional cost of ancillary services and infrastructure associated with the delivery of the National Secondary School Computer Fund should be encouraged to explore open source software." It offered the services of Open Source Industry Australia, the national industry body for Open Source within the country, and Linux Australia, the peak body for Linux User Groups in the country, if the government wanted to explore the use of FOSS in the education sector. Donna Benjamin, the education spokesperson for Open Source Victoria, an industry cluster of more than 80 Victorian firms and developers which provides services and technology related to FOSS, and one of the signatories to the letter, said she was in the process of drafting a briefing document which would be sent to the minister's staff who were directly involved in providing PCs to secondary schools. "And I have been thinking about convening an Open Source for Education Working Group - drawing together the different groups putting effort into this space so we are better able to resource teachers, technicians and schools who are already working with free and open source software, or are not sure where to start," she said. Among the other signatories were Max McLaren, the general manager for Red Hat Linux in the Asia-Pacific region, and Karen Koomen, who handles government affairs for IBM Australia. Local Linux luminaries Stewart Smith, the current president of Linux Australia, well-known kernel hacker Paul "Rusty" Russell and Andrew Tridgell, Australia's best known free software personality and the developer of Samba and rsync, are also part of the push. |
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