On Tuesday 10 February 2004 08:06, Sam Hiser wrote:

I agree with this statement whole heartedly. Hence our movie. But we are still about 10 to 12 months away from release.

We have about 20 hours of audio tape that need to be transcribed. This means that we will need to get the audio typed into a written form, preferrably in a .sxw (OOo Writer) format. We are looking for volunteers to help out if anyone is interested! It is tedious work, though. The first hour of doing it is interesting, but after that it gets boring, so anyone who volunteers, thanks tons in advance for suffering through it!

We are going to be interviewing Lawrence Lessig, author of "The Future of Ideas" later this month for the purposes of having him explain exactly that point. However, it would also be nice to have a few short clips from different people giving concrete examples of how proprietary standards make their lives worse, not better. You've all probably seen the MS commercials, "Life is better with the butterfly". Not. Also the commercials in which a kid jumps off of a bus and MS superimposes line drawings of him jumping off onto the moon in an astronaut. That particular piece was probably inspired by the Portland schools, where MS threatened to subject them to a $100,000.00 audit. That means that the school district would have had to spend $100,000.00 just to show MS that it was complying with MS's rules, and that $100,000.00 did not include any fines that MS might have levied. MS eventually backed off after there was a howl of protests. So not only did MS not get its audit, Portland schools started using Linux and OOo big time; plus MS got a rep for going after schools. Hence the misleading commercials about how good they are for schools.

So that will be a stark example of the cost of dealing with a monopoly. But we need more examples. Plus transcribers!

Right. Audits. Costs for maintaining and tracking licenses. Viruses. More down time. Every where we went in the Portland public schools, the (Republican and Democratic) administrators were complaining about these additional costs. In fact, after going to Linux, these schools were typically SAVING the cost of a teacher's salary for every school of say 400 or more kids. So MS's arguments are totally disconnected from what we are learning in the field.

Also, there is a huge advantage to having in place an IT infrastructure that does not break. Paul Nelson of the Riverdale school system has said that their system of having Linux thin clients permitted them to 1) save enough money to buy 4 mongo servers; 2) free Paul Nelson from having to work 7/8s of his day on tech, and teach 7/8s of a day, thereby preventing the Riverdale district from having to hire another teacher to teach; 3) the kids were on thin clients, and so couldn't break the terminals, as opposed to networked peer-to-peer Win boxes which the kids were hammering by putting stuff in drives, etc, which was causing lots of down time 4) the thin client boxes with monitors were only $85.00 per work station! and yet they have blazing speed because the thin clients are pushing stuff out to the thin clients at amazing speed; 5) the thin clients are running OOo, another huge savings in licenses, maintaining licenses, blah blah blah. People have to know about the success of Riverdale.

Paul Nelson and his buds have written a program which lets people install this thin client software with only 6 "yes" clicks (once the physical network of thin clients has been set up). Check it out.

http://k12linux.org/contents.html