UK Schools forced to go Open Source

Fanciful? No not at all and here is why in three short headings:

Credit Crunchy Stuff:

1) I think we can take it as read that there is a shortage of money as credit withdrawal directly impacts on the major school refurbishment programs and the BSF programs. All of the Goverment's schemes in this sector are joint Public and Private ventures and the private sector is squeezed dry by the lack of Bank lending.

There is of course precious little point bringing forward public spending schemes unless you are prepared to lend directly to your partner industries, which at the time of writing is not the case. Ergo, no lending to construction companies and the like, then no BSF.

If no BSF and no mega-refurbishment program then a major gravy-train for certain public-fund-dependent software and hardware vendors stops. Insolvency beckons for some.

2) Continuing in the above vein, in difficult times risk-mitigation against supplier insolvency is a big issue. Take for example the education Learning Platform market. At last week's BETT show I think I counted nine for sale and one for free.

In any market, this is all a bit crowded for such a specialised product. I think that probably when and if LPs take off (or get made compulsory) the market could stand three or four LPs.

Do you remember that in a previous post I pointed out how hard it is to migrate from one LP to another? Well actually it's nigh on impossible so you had better make the right choice of vendor, five of the nine will be gone in three years...

..Go for the big company for safety? I think not, see point 1 above; being bigger now simply means falling faster due to poor debt-to-equity ratios*. Who would have thought Microsoft would be laying off 5000 staff as anounced this week and are unable to forecast future profits?

*(Or maybe they are 'over-geared' or 'leveraged' or not liquid enough. The good thing is that I now feel confident that my understanding of the jargon is at least as good as our clueless bankers)

Exams are a changing

By 2010 all of the UK ICT school syllabuses will have been launched with a new contemporary look. Without giving away any state or commercial secrets, expect to see a lot less of the Examination Boards' traditional emphasis on Office software and much more diversity into web, graphics, sound and movie software-related activities.

Don't however expect cash-strapped schools to go out en-masse and buy Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Mac Garage for all and sundry.

However... luckily for the brave-new-syllabus-world of 2010 all software bases are covered by free, open source software which works on Windows as well as Mac and Linux. What luck.

Open Source Software Support

The UK Government now endorses suppliers of Open Source software through their accreditation schemes (OGC-Becta) in the same way it did the proprietary vendors. So it's now really easy to get the stuff and someone reputable to support it.

Conclusions

There will be two big drivers that force schools to adopt accredited open source software at an unprecedented level.

1) Syllabus Change, this in the past would have required expensive proprietary software (which of course now cannot be afforded) but equivalents are however available free as open source software.

2) Risk Mitigation. For example when investing in a Learning Platform or proprietary network management software. Where will you stand when your choice of vendor goes bust during a recession? Did you get the source code when you bought it? Thought not.

But...If you had chosen an Open Source solution then if your supplier went bust then someone else can simply step into the breach. Or, even, you could do it yourself. Open Source Software such as Moodle belongs to no one person or company. It belongs to the community of developers and users and as such can be picked up and taken on by anyone.

This completely reduces your exposure. In risky, cash-strapped times it is a brave school or Local Authority that takes a chance on getting locked into a soon-to-be-no-more proprietary solution vendor.

Surely even if the little proprietary fish die off the biggest fish of all will still be there to support its millions of lines of secret code..won't it?

Can you afford to take the chance?

ps I should have expanded on the title of this post and said, 'logic and caution will 'force' schools to go Open Source software' but it's not so catchy.