English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

For my third research blog, I've chosen to highlight some case studies I've located on small schools that are having success using open source software. Many times "success" is defined by the school as simply the software does everything the closed source alternative can do, but it's up front cost is zero. The only costs associated with this type of software are management, maintenance, and loss (loss can be functionality, downtime, missing features, etc.)

A great example is the Mount Tamar Special School, which has 80 special needs students, 15 teachers, and 10 support staff. The school is located in three separate buildings, but each is linked with fiber. In 2003, the school had 20 Windows 95 computers which weren't meeting the needs of students and teachers. The upfront costs associated with upgrading these machines and the network to a proprietary, closed source system would have cost $12,000-$14,000. Instead the school chose to use a combination of SuSe and Gentoo Linux as operating systems on both new and old machines.

To overcome one of the biggest disadvantages of using open source, the cost of installation, management, and maintenance, the school's system administrators built one copy of the open source operation system from scratch, and used it to make an image to which they applied to all the systems. This saves a tremendous amount of time, and is one of the reasons Microsoft's Windows operating systems is so useful in large networks. This same functionality can now be accomplished in the open source software world.

These case studies can be used directly in-line in the text, and can serve as examples for other schools looking for ways to save money while upgrading their existing network to serve the technology needs of the students and staff.