Educators wary of open source

...the Eastern Pilbara College of TAFE (that's in and near Port Hedland, for fairly loose definitions of "near") were caught up in a program to "rationalise" the IT infrastructure of Western Australia's outback TAFEs. Up to this point, EPCoT had the highest service availability (per student or per IT dollar, no matter how you factored it) in the state.

The "rationalisation" consisted of stomping on the existing IT polyculture with 100% Microsoft software from end to end, and The story of one such service pretty much epitomises the process. As it happens, the bloke in charge of the process was the father of a a neighbour of ours at the time. The service in question was "the student server".

The original box in question had literally been assembled from floor scrapings (parts of dubious integrity recovered from other machines) with no budget by the IT people. It ran scripted web services, file shares and a database on Linux. Not even a fancy Linux, just a free version of Red Hat. The students did all manner of amazing things with this simple tool.

Then came the day of the revolution, and it was replaced with a modern, punchy, rack-mount server. A slower one despite the horsepower shining out of every crevice (one can only imagine how fast the same box would have been had it run a decent OS), and one without a database, at least in the first round. Oh, yes, and it crashed constantly.

The students were not happy. Revisions were made, more powerful hardware was thrown at the problem, and so on. At last count, they had spent AUD$120,000 on replacing an essentially free mongrel server, had replaced it with two shiny new musclebound boxen, and the two new MS servers were still slower and less reliable than than the Linux mongrel they replaced. D'oh!

That's just one example -- a nice, clear, well compartmentalised one -- but it was, from what various IT staff have told me, also a fairly typical one. From conversations with other TAFE IT people, most TAFEs don't have an IT clue, and not even sustained application of the good old double-ought cluebat would give them one.

There are, of course, exceptions. Some TAFEs are excellent (there's one I know of in South Oz), but the sad fact is that they are indeed exceptions, not the rule.