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The European Union's interoperability page reports:
Using open source in school greatly reduces the time needed to troubleshoot PCs, [as indicated by] the case of the Colegio Agustinos de León (Augustinian College of León, Spain). In 2013, the school switched to using Ubuntu Linux for its desktop PCs in [classrooms] and offices. For teachers and staff, the amount of technical issues decreased by 63 per cent and in the school's computer labs by 90 per cent, says Fernando Lanero, computer science teacher and head of the school's IT department.
[...] "One year after we changed PC operating system, I have objective data on Ubuntu Linux", Lanero tells Muy Linux [English Translation], a Spanish Linux news site. By switching to Linux, incidents such as computer viruses, system degradation, and many diverse technical issues disappeared instantly.
The change also helps the school save money, he adds. Not having to purchase [licenses] for proprietary operating systems, office suites, and anti-virus tools has already saved about €35,000 in the 2014-2015 school year, Lanero says. "Obviously it is much more interesting to invest that money in education."
[...] The biggest hurdle for the IT department was the use of electronic whiteboards. The school uses 30 of such whiteboards, and their manufacturer [Hitachi] does not support the use of Linux. Lanero got the Spanish Linux community involved, and "after their hard work, Ubuntu Linux now includes support for the whiteboards, so now everything is working as it should".
[...] Issues [with proprietary document formats] were temporarily resolved by using a cloud-based proprietary office solution, says Lanero, giving the IT department time to complete the switch to open standards-based office solutions. The school now mostly uses the LibreOffice suite of office tools.
[...] "Across the country, schools have contacted me to hear about the performance and learn how to undertake similar migrations."
As I always say, simply avoid manufacturers with lousy support and FOSS is just the ticket.
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 26 2015, @03:59PM
Web doesn't necessarily imply public access. It pretty much does for consumer stuff like "internet refrigerator" or "internet thermostat", admittedly.
Plenty of engineering tools at work live on RFC1918 addresses with no external NAT access and provide a tasty easy to use web interface.
In "the really old days" we used to have things like remote test gear connected by honest to god serial ports and modems for "remote" and in the 90s I got involved in projects to put them on terminal servers so we could just telnet from any desktop machine on our LAN. Since the turn of the century all that is gone and everyone ships web clients.
Even our hourly employee timeclock is now a website. All our reporting systems. All our UPS'es. Transfer switches and their battery chargers. 20+ years ago logging was a bunch of RS232 alert lines feeding to a dot matrix line printer, thats all online via web for monitoring subsystems now. I don't have access to it but I'm told the HVAC "front panel" is entirely virtual online now.
All that stuff, 10+ years ago, would have been a native desktop app. I remember having to support them and having to fight IT to install our engineering applications. Its a lot easier to get permission to connect to the engineering/production network and just access a certain URL in a web browser.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 26 2015, @04:10PM
The problem with website style access is that it's a poor design to interact with for other software. So the whole software-to-software communication becomes a huge and lengthy hurdle.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 26 2015, @04:13PM
s/lengthy/unreliable/
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 26 2015, @04:28PM
The unix philosophy of small cooperative tools is actively opposed. Thus the giant monolith.
In the old days of telnet servers and RS-232 connections I was the guy stuck writing "EXPECT" scripts to automate work.
The modern solution is presenting some kind of REST ish standard ish API. Being a standard there are of course like 15 incompatible standards. But machine to machine automation is hardly impossible over the web. I've been stuck doing all sorts of SOAPy WSDLy foolishness over the years.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 26 2015, @04:41PM
Not impossible. Just very cumbersome.
It's almost like.. oh this webinterface is messy. Fix it? nah. Slam OpenWRT etc.. onto and be done with it using some script on the device.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday May 27 2015, @08:29AM
It usually means giving access to the documents to some cloud-service-provider. Big companies can run their own servers etc., but smaller businesses won't. If I found out my tax-adviser, physician, priest, therapist or other business partner was managing my personal data at googledocs or another cloud service, I'd look for another one,
For consumers it definitely means entrusting their data to some other companies, usually US-based. This is a no-go for me. The US made it pretty clear that, while they might consider to eventually obey privacy laws regarding their own citizens, foreigners don't have any such privileges.
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