Good afternoon forum users,
We are last year Business Administration students from a Dutch University and are doing an interesting research about open source systems. We found out some things about the use of OSS in the Netherlands, but still have some questions about the OSS in the United Kingdom.
Do you mind if we ask you some questions the following months concerning OSS on secondary schools in the UK?
Thanks in advance,
Jochem Durenkamp
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Good afternoon forum users,
We’re last year Business Administration students from a Dutch University and are doing an interesting research about open source systems. We found out some things about the use of OSS in the Netherlands, but still have some questions about the OSS in the United Kingdom.
Do you mind if we ask you some questions the following months concerning OSS on secondary schools in the UK?
Thanks in advance,
Jochem Durenkamp
Welcome Jochem.
We look forward to your questions.
Hi Jochem,
more than happy to help!
I feel very welcome, thank you.
The questions are really diverse, so we will understand that you can't answer all the questions.
1 - How does the license structure looks like at secondary schools?
Do they have to pay the full amount or do they get a discount?
2 - Are those prices per student/FTE/device or school?
3 - Does anybody know the amount of devices at the UK schools?
4 - What kind of OSS do they mostly use at secondary schools?
More questions will follow later ;)
Thanks in advance.
Kind regards,
Jochem
1 - How does the license structure looks like at secondary schools?
Do they have to pay the full amount or do they get a discount? Licencing can be quite complex, proprietry software can have a range of pricing structures, though most give discount. there are licencing fees for additional services such as "LGFL" (London Grid for Learning) or MLEs such as "Fronter". Prices that are typically paid for these are in the region of £20,000 per school.
2 - Are those prices per student/FTE/device or school? Prices of desktop software can be either on a per desktop basis or priced per school. We are a school of 600 pupils, mainly using windows (though I'm working on this!) Windows and MS Office licence costs the school £10,000 per annum.
3 - Does anybody know the amount of devices at the UK schools? The latest figures from BECTA were from 2007 and suggest that there is a ratio of 1 computer for every 3 pupils in the UK. There are currently 8,400,000 pupils in UK schools (State funded) so that would be about 2,800,000 computers being used in UK State schools.
4 - What kind of OSS do they mostly use at secondary schools? For our part we use, inkscape, gimp, openoffice, firefox, Kompozer, VLC player Audacity, Hugin, Infrarecorder, Paint.net Sweethome3D, Geogebra, Scratch, Ubuntu. Hope this helps Best wishes David
Speaking from a comprehensive secondary point of view (free at the point of use, no entry exam, 11-16 age group, 830 students, 100 staff):
1 - How does the license structure looks like at secondary schools? Do they have to pay the full amount or do they get a discount?
Proprietary software is usually discounted. Some of it is free. Some of it is full price.
2 - Are those prices per student/FTE/device or school?
Depends on the software and supplying company more than the institution. We have software licenses per device, per school, and some content and services that are licensed per student.
3 - Does anybody know the amount of devices at the UK schools?
Depends what you mean by devices, and it varies massively by school. Could you extrapolate the question more? Rather than just say "about 360 computers", I'll break it down (again, desktop figures are approx and specific to my school):
200 Windows XP desktops
70 Ubuntu desktops
50 Apple Mac desktops
20 Ubuntu laptops
10 Windows laptops
4 Apple Mac laptops
10 physical servers running Debian
8 virtual servers running Debian
2 virtual servers running Windows 2003 Server
1 mobile phone (for now)
2 display screens
4 - What kind of OSS do they mostly use at secondary schools?
For desktops:
Audacity/Traverso
Open Office
Inkscape
Scribus (ocassionally)
Firefox
GIMP
Celestia
Gnome/KDE
Various little games and widgets
For the servers:
OpenLDAP
Samba
Apache
MySQL
Joomla
Squid
ClamAV
bind/dhcpd/nfsd