[Technical] Interesting computers-in-education piece. Education&the ACCC

[Con Zymaris]

On Fri, Aug 05, 2005 at 02:57:47PM +1000, Clark, Ian C wrote:
>  
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > When you're the Department of Education, you are making a 
> > decision for 187,000+ PCs and over half a million users. 
> > There will be many instances when your choice for one 
> > platform doesn't apply across that whole user space. It may 
> > be sub-optimal. Therefore, pushing a one-size-fits-all 
> > approach is a problem. 
> 
> Hi Con,
> 
> You better get this right before your company spends anything on legal
> fees!  :-)
> 
> The Department doesn't decide this for 187000 PCs and half a million
> users - the individual schools do.
> 
> The only SOE (Standard Operating Environment) is the Office setup in
> each school.

Unfortunately, I'm having no luck in accessing the 
http://www.tenders.vic.gov.au/ site to show you the refenrences to the 
tenders we're talking about. The site seems to be off air. If you can, can 
you search for the Microsoft agreements made by the DET and paste their 
details back to this list?

> 
> There is no central prescribing of operating systems a school purchases
> for its students or staff.
> 
> So, there are schools with Novell, Macintosh and Linux computers. Some
> reimage the leased IBM laptops they receive to better suit them ... they
> could put Debian on them if they wanted.

That doesn't stop a largish slice of money having gone automatically to 
Microsoft for copies of OEM Windows and OEM Office that aren't being used. 
Correct?

-- 
___________________________________________________________________________
Con Zymaris <conz at cyber.com.au> Level 4, 10 Queen St, Melbourne, Australia 
Cybersource: Australia's Leading Linux and Open Source Solutions Company 
Web: http://www.cyber.com.au/  Phone: 03 9621 2377   Fax: 03 9621 2477