Open Source: Homeschool Computing

While it is swell that friends who homeschooled got the author thinking of this topic - it is far from just homeschooling parents who should be worried about the type of content their children are consuming on the internet. An article such as this could/should easily be targeted at all parents - not just homeschooling ones.

~Jeff

Jeff, you're absolutely correct.

I would make the caveat that while publicly funded school systems have both economies of scale (build once, deploy widely) and all the money they can spend (it's for the children), the homeschooler tends to have both a smaller community and less ready cash for the project.

This is exactly where F/OSS shines, enabling ad-hoc communities and costing less in terms of both hardware and software.

The added benefit of having "open source" for learning purposes is just icing on the cake.

That is a very good point Bob - wish my family had known about all this open source software goodness when I was growing up as a home-schooled child.

~Jeff

@Bob_Robertson: Recent budget cuts have made it very clear that public schools do not have all the money the can spend. The huge rounds of teacher layoffs across the country make that very clear. What galls me is that they could save a lot of money in government in this state across the board by simply not paying Microsoft and moving to Open Source. When I did some support of a government department in 2009-10 when my business was slow I got to listen to the GIS specialist I supported complain that the open alternatives to the proprietary product they were using had more features and better support and didn't have the high price tag. Yet, in this state, the government was pushing to eliminate all legacy operating systems, commercial UNIX, and anything even vaguely open in favor of all Microsoft all the time at huge cost.

Caitlyn, indeed there are some few budget cuts, but no tax cuts. Pensions and administrator salaries are really killing what's available for doing anything else. Like teaching.

One of the aspects of working at NASA was the "campus" atmosphere. It was perfectly acceptable to use spare hardware and F/OSS to build systems and servers as needed, but there was also the bureaucratic "need" near the end of budget time to spend every last dime, some of which went to replacing those adequate forms with paid software, new hardware, etc. So while Linux swiftly came in "through the backdoor into the server room", it was also shouldered aside as time went on.

The perverse incentives of bureaucracy are destructive to anything like actual progress.