According to the schools' IT System Administrator Daniel Hedblom, the Sollefteå council is increasingly becoming aware of the advantages of free and open source. "For those who are not IT savvy, IT vendor lock-in is hard to understand. However, the cost of IT is an important topic for the council", he says. He expects that the success of free and open source software in Sollefteå's schools, will motivate the municipality to increasingly turn to this software in their own organisation.
Hedblom is the IT administrator managing more than 1 600 PCs for a total of 2 600 students and numerous laptops for the teachers. The schools rely on the Resara Linux Server, providing commercial support for Samba, open source tools for offering group policies and file and print services in networks of PCs running proprietary operating systems. Schools use many open source applications on their PCs, including LibreOffice, a suite of office tools, and web browsers Chrome and Firefox.
"Savings on licences for proprietary software was at first the main reason to use open source, but as we gained experienced with it, we found that for many tasks, free and open source is the better solution", he adds.
Advocates of open source in the Sollefteå municipality are not in contact with like-minded public administrations or schools in Sweden regrets Hedblom: "Advocating free and open source software attracts the attention of those who will resist it at any cost. Those that use it have learned to be quiet about it" he concludes.
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