Open Source leader, Red Hat, proposes to provide software to every school district in the United States if Microsoft provides computing hardware for the 14,000 poorest school districts. On November 20, 2001, Red Hat, Inc. (one provider of the Linux Operating System) proposed an alternative to the settlement announced in the class action lawsuit against Microsoft. Red Hat has offrered to provide open source software to EVERY school district in the United States free of charge, encouraging Microsoft to redirect the money it would have spent on software into purchasing hardware for the 14,000 poorest school districts.
What about school information systems? Current users of SASI or similar school programs could be able to use their programs on their existing office systems. The Linux machines wouldn't necessarily need to be implemented in the offices but could be used by students for study, research and development. NCS Pearson's product SASI was originnally written in C which can be tweaked to work with Linux if NCS Pearson decided to do so.
One of the large scale problems in this country is Microsoft's high cost software. Microsoft's software is proprietary and limits the users.
What is open source? Open source users believe in open code so programmers can share code and know that the code is not stolen, and users agree to share code with other programmers for the advancement of technology.
Proprietary software is not a bonus. Proprietary software limits the users. The companies that create proprietary software charge an outrageous amount of money for either the software or the hardware required to run the software. In the case of NCS Pearson, in many cases, their proposals for software include hardware requirements. The hardware is usually purchased from NCS Pearson. Is this hardware and software worth the cost considering free software and a free operating system is available for existing hardware?
Richard Stallman started the free software foundation. He believed that software should be free or available to view. If software is not open, if software is proprietary, we
1. don't know where the code originated 2. can't tweak the code to perform at the level we need 3. can't create a better program or advanced level program(s) for use
Many high end computer programmers and users are currently involved in the open source and free software movements. Linus Torvalds wrote the kernel Linux and the rest of the system is the GNU system. This is why many people call this GNU Linux. Red Hat is just one company that offers Linux to the public.
