FOSS Force Asked LibreOffice and Collabora: Why Aren’t They in Schools Instead of Word and Google Docs?
“Much free and open source software helps its users save money as possible — on both hardware and software — while protecting their privacy. It also often makes it easy for them to learn how it works — if they’re interested — and customize it in any way they want or need.”
“With such features, FOSS should be the default choice in any educational environment, in these days when many schools face budget cuts, and switching to free as in free beer proprietary cloud applications like Microsoft Teams or Google Docs to save money has the consequence of actively preparing and educating pupils to be endless sources of data to be exploited for the likes of money and political control.”
There are really no big surprises here in the answers from LibreOffice or Collabora. And there should be a lot going for open source such as being able to use much older hardware, studying and adapting the code, no lock-in license fees, complete and unbroken support for the same open standards such as ODF that governments have endorsed, but yet... big money does tend to make the world go around.
Those massive kick-backs that Microsoft gives to education, and the digital villages that they build, etc, all have to be paid for. That money comes out of the far bigger license and cloud subscription costs that governments are already paying. For any change to happen, the whole economic model needs top be rethought. Today, with internal IT being more and more outsourced to cloud service subscriptions, I don't see this change happening easily.
In fact, with cloud services the lock-in is way greater than just the internal IT capacity being lost, it is also data lock-in.
Ideally, organisations want to be igniting local innovation around IT as well as hosting, and building up their own shared resources. And that all starts with education.
See
FOSS Force
We Asked LibreOffice and Collabora: Why Aren’t They in Schools Instead of Word and Google Docs? - FOSS Force
We ask LibreOffice and Collabora why their software isn't used in more schools, and what can be done to turn that around.
#technology #education #opensource
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