FLOSS – a global movement:

 

 

 

 

FLOSS – a global movement:

 

• Open Source Index, developed by Red Hat and the Georgia Institute of Technology (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

• Ranking of FLOSS licenses, produced by Black Duck Software (USA), based on about 185,000 software projects all over the world and 1698 (!) various FLOSS licenses: GPL version 2 is still by far the most widely used open source license. The GPL was carefully designed to promote the production of more free software and has succeeded in achieving this overarching goal.

 

FLOSS in Austria:

 

• Linux distributions developed and maintainened in Austria: Juxlala for pre-school children, Desktop4Education for pupils and students, grml for network administrators and text tool users

• Open Source for Austrian enterprises – hub for FLOSS-based business activities

FLOSS use at Austrian schools:

 

Austria places great emphasis on FLOSS use at schools and has established professional support structures for pupils and teachers.The assumption of proprietary software that „one size fits all“ is absolutely wrong: FLOSS enhances significantly the students´creativity, problem-solving skills, self-esteem, communication and research skills. It helps students to develop their intellectual potential to the full, to become autonomous learners and well-adjusted individuals willing to contribute to the community. A number of questions have to be addressed:

 

 

 

• What kind of ICT should students be learning?

• What skills should pupils be developing, and to what level?

• What is the contribution of ICT to students´ wider education?

• How should students´ ICT understanding be assessed?

   

 

 

There are 12 „academic thinking skills“ (analyzing, comparing, categorizing and classifying, identifying cause and effect, problem solving, persuading, emphasizing, synthesizing, interpreting, evaluating, communicating, applying) – these „academic thinking skills“ are nurtured by FLOSS, not by the commercial products of private monopolies!

 

My favourite coding editor is Bluefish – a Web editor for Linux that can be used for coding more than 20 languages, including Pascal, java, Ruby, Python, Perl etc. It was initially designed to serve as an html editor.

 

 

 

Geography:

 

In the last issue of the nationwide educational magazine for teachers of geography GW-Unterricht ( Nr. 115/2009, p. 67) the complete switch from proprietary products to OpenOffice.org in all Austrian schools was demanded, because FLOSS is much better suited to the needs of students and teachers. One valuable asset of OpenOffice.org is that it can be used without any difficulties within the most popular e-learning environment Moodle which is, by the way, a very successful FLOSS product in its own right, too.

 

More than 12,000 questions from all subjects have been collected in Schoolquiz. If you look at free educational resources developed and maintained by Austrian schools like hak.cc you can see that FLOSS is used extensively in all Austrian educational settings. There are now many tools online that help students to perform their tasks, so that traditionally purchased proprietary software is not necessary anymore.

 

A lot of students use their own notebooks or netbooks. The Linux distributions for netbooks like Easy Peasy, xPUD, Linpus Linux Lite or Moblin boot in seconds and help the students to get the most out of their netbooks. They are optimized for enjoying media, including educational media, and interacting with social networks. Students grow up in a totally computerized environment.

 

Students collect within the framework of the initiative Linux4Africa old hardware for African schools, transforming it for instance into thin clients and learn by doing this a lot not only in technical terms, but also about the living conditions of their peers in developing countries. Increasingly, school partnerships are set up between Austrian schools and schools especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

 

 

 

 

FLOSS in Austrian public administrations:

 

Public administrations in Austria work with and participate in the communities that develop and maintain FLOSS. Austria is not missing a clear strategy about how to foster the Austrian open source ecosystem through training, education, research, tax benefits, grants to community-driven Linux and FLOSS projects etc. FLOSS is perceived as a means of reducing the dependency on commercial suppliers and to promote interoperability. A high number of significant national and regional open source projects is funded by government agencies at all levels.

 

The Austrian Ministry of Justice switched completely to OpenOffice.org in 2008. From the beginning of the year 2009 onwards proprietary formats are not accepted anymore within the judicial system and have to be rejected. The migration posed no problems whatsoever, helpdesks were installed and one-day courses offered. Everything went smoothly.

 

In the Austrian court system, 11,600 persons are employed. There are 13,000 PCs with 19-inch flat screen monitors in use and 1,000 notebooks. The annual budget for ICT is 36,3 million € (2007), that is 4 percent of the overall budget. Every 4 years PCs, notebooks, printers etc. are replaced. The annual ICT costs per individual are about 3,100 €. You can´t manage what you can´t measure!

 

Very often, public administrations show a commitment to FLOSS out of necessity rather than by choice. This is due to budgetary restraints and necessary broad cost cuts. Public administrations run up large costs if they continue to use proprietary solutions and they become increasingly aware of the fact that they are locked into these proprietary solutions via long-term framework contracts.

 

 

 

 

The only reason we have a wholly free operating system is because of the movement that said we want an operating system that´s wholly free, not 90 percent free.

 

(Richard STALLMAN)

 

 

 

We need to keep talking about Free Software all the time. Certainly, the advocates of closed source software are untiring, and have great resources to push their agenda.

 

(JON „MADDOG“ HALL)

 

 

Writings of Dr. Herbert GASSNER:

 

http://herbert.gassner.googlepages.com/100 – why you should NOT use any Microsoft products (a lot of arguments!). After sifting through years of data, many researchers have come to the factual conclusion that FLOSS is, for a variety of reasons, far superior to proprietary programs.