If the article on software in schools ('Pupils suffer in schools computer row' NZ Herald, Tuesday 29 May 2007) highlighted one thing, it surely was the fact that the New Zealand Ministry of Education is spending NZ$100 million over 10 years to put software in schools. This $100 million represents an immense missed opportunity for New Zealand children, New Zealand education and ultimately the economy.
The press release issued by Microsoft on the signing of the deal makes it clear that what we are getting is mainly a Microsoft Vista / Office combination. This is not enough for schools to build a meaningful digital infrastructure and it will do little or nothing for students in junior schools, who are unlikely to be thrilled by the prospect of running a word processor and spreadsheet. What the deal also ignores is that a Microsoft based computer lab requires significant investment in 'after market' software such as antivirus and internet access monitoring software just to keep the computers secure. Microsoft Vista, moreover, will only run on the newest hardware, whereas many schools run second hand computers. The $100 million that we are spending now is only the beginning.
But the opportunity missed is much larger than the money saved if a free alternative was chosen. To get a full sense of the size of the opportunity we are missing here, we should look at what we otherwise could have done. As your correspondent Peter Griffin points out in a blog post on the Herald website the ministry could have opted to go with open source software. To some degree they have done so. The Neo Office package which is now recommended as the office package on the school Macintosh computers is a Macintosh port of the well known openoffice.org package.
But had the ministry chosen to go the whole way and choose a package like edubuntu for the schools, the opportunities would have been far more significant. Edubuntu is a solid combination of operating system and applications aimed at children from kindergarten to secondary school. My children, aged 6 and 10, use it daily. It is easy to install, has no or few issues with viruses, and comes with many different educational packages ranging from math and spelling games to complex graphics packages.
One could argue, as was indeed done in the Herald article that such free software is full of bugs and not ready for primetime. To do so misrepresents the reality of software development. All software has bugs. In fact, many studies on this topic suggest that open source software has less bugs than most closed source software.
But functionality is only one side of the coin. What is in fact most important about free software is its underlying license and associated philosophy. Free software and open source developers are fond of saying that the software is not only free as in 'free beer' but also free as in 'free speech'. It is the last freedom that matters most.
Free software is published under a license called the 'General Public License' (GPL for short). The GPL grants the end user not only the right to use the software, but also to distribute it (give it away to friends), make modifications to the software and finally distribute these modifications.
These four rights are a good fit with our prized 'kiwi ingenuity' and New Zealand should have made the most of it. We could have been leading the way in integrating our school curriculum directly with the software used in schools, building on the basis already present in open source software to provide age appropriate software integrated with children's other learning materials. This would have led to a wave of IT reinforced learning that our kids are now missing out on.
What is more, doing so would have provided local jobs for developers and integrators and would have had significant spin-off effects into the software development and creative industries.
Students in secondary school would have had a solid platform to develop their own software, and gain in-depth experience with the technologies used in putting a modern operating system together. These students would also have been exposed to the open source development model, which is arguably the most efficient software development model currently in existence.
Finally, deploying open source in schools would have helped preparing our children for further study, recognising that Unix type operating systems are an established mainstay of computer science and natural science curriculums.
Going open source in our schools would have made eminent educational and economic sense. It would have aligned New Zealand with similar initiatives in other countries, such as in the European Union, South Africa, parts of the USA and a number of South American countries. It would have given IT in schools a significant boost and helped us well on the way to becoming a kiwi ingenuity based knowledge economy.
