V. Sasi Kumar wrote:
Actually, it is the prevailing wisdom that is the culprit. The prevailing wisdom says that unless there is a commercial entity, things won't work properly. This is a result of another piece of prevaiing wisdom that people will not do anything without a profit motive. We have demolished the idea that creativity will not flourish without monetary incentive -- worse, that creativity will not flourish whithout exclusionary rights, without monopoly. Prof. Patnaik theoretically showed this to be false in his speech at the seminar in Thiruvananthapuram on 6th and Prof. Eben Moglen showed how this is false in real life. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who believe this to be true, including some people who themselves may not act accordingly. The adoption of Free Software in IT@School could have happened much earlier but for the belief that a commercial entity is needed for support.
The article mentioned the MoU covering not just "e-education" but also "e-governance"(I hate using e- in front of any word, but here I am simply copying what was there in the article).
Strictly speaking, support is not about creativity. Yes, sometimes it might involve a bit of creativity in solving certain problems, but mostly the problems are common and repetitive. So, while I am not disputing that "creativity can flourish without commercial incentive", I feel that is somewhat of an irrelevant point in this discussion, and any further discussion on that lines would only take us away from my question here i.e. How can we ensure non-commercial, timely and reliable support to organizations moving to FOSS solutions?
My experience with users groups however points to the fact that LUGs are not always suitable for providing a support environment to organizations - * LUGs hate repetitive questions * LUGs do not guarantee that a problem would be solved in a certain amount of time * LUGS do not guarantee that someone would actually go ahead and do the required amount of research to solve a previously un-encountered problem, * many LUGs are filled with people who have a certain way of interactions with newcomers in a way that is quite different from similar interactions in a professional environment.
All of these are important for organisations moving to FOSS. And yes, they hold for government institutions too.
Please do not misunderstand me when I say this, but I personally do not think that requirement for FOSS support in the education field is not as demanding (in terms of the "time" factor) as in other organisations. So while a certain level of community support might seem adequate for the education field, it might not be good enough for other institutions.
I admit that I have not followed the contributions of FSF towards IT@School at all, and so I am interested in knowing that model further. From what I have learned that there is a training mechanism in place for teachers here. But, since training is almost completely different from day-to-day support, what is the mechanism in place to support teachers when they need it. What is the level of support promised to them by this project?
- Sandip