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posted by janrinok on Tuesday May 26 2015, @12:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the life-is-easier-with-FOSS dept.

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]

 
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  • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday May 26 2015, @07:01PM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Tuesday May 26 2015, @07:01PM (#188194) Journal

    For a moment you had me there. I had to deal with ClearCase once, some time ago...

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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday May 26 2015, @08:16PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday May 26 2015, @08:16PM (#188245)

    I had one job where I had to use it daily. It really wasted a lot of my time. AFAICT, it might have made a little sense back in the 80s when it was first developed, but it stopped making any sense after about 2000, when everything else passed it up.

    What ClearCase really is is a poster child for inertia. It made sense for big companies to use it for big projects in a time when there weren't any really good alternatives (they had CVS back then, but for really big projects, especially multi-site projects, that had a lot of issues). So these big companies bought into it, made it their "corporate standard", and now decades later they're stuck with it and they refuse to change because everything is locked up in it. I believe there's actually some programs to migrate CC data to Subversion or Git, but again inertia rears its ugly head: no one wants to be the one to risk their management reputation on doing this, so it never gets done.