OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
\IND\Speech:nn:The Hon. D.G.E. HOOD The Hon. D.G.E. HOOD: I would like to speak today about free and open source software, something that was once dear to the heart of the Hon. Ian Gilfillan. I would like to acknowledge the presence in the gallery this afternoon of Mr Paul Schultz, who is a key supporter of—
The ACTING PRESIDENT (Hon. J.S.L. Dawkins): Members should not refer to people in the gallery.
The Hon. D.G.E. HOOD: Thank you, Mr Acting President. Last week it was reported that the French parliament was dumping Microsoft products in place of open source software. The move came after successful transmission by their Ministry of Agriculture and Police. Starting in June next year, French deputies will use desktops and servers running Linux software instead of Microsoft Windows; Mozilla's Firefox web browser in place of Internet Explorer; and Open Office—a free open source alternative to Microsoft's Office software. Documents will be saved in a non-proprietary open document format. As an aside, I note that on 31 March 2006 the National Archives of Australia also settled on the open document format to ensure long-term access to data without legal or technical barriers.
A detailed study concluded that the move will result in substantial savings, despite the associated migration and training costs. Free and open source software is being produced as I speak by developers all over the world and, indeed, many of them are operating in South Australia. The majority of these developers are volunteers, donating their time and energy to improve and give away free software. And it is free in every sense of the word—free from any licensing costs, but also free in the sense that it can be used, copied, studied, modified, improved and redistributed with little or no restriction. With developers all over the world freely and constantly improving the software, it is little wonder that many open source solutions are now outpacing Microsoft solutions.
I want to focus primarily on the Linux Open Source Operating System—a free competitor to Microsoft Windows. There are various `flavours', if I can put it that way, of Linux, including Red Hat, Novell Suse, Mandriva, amongst others. One of the most popular at the current time is called Ubuntu, which is Linux as well. Ubuntu in the African Zulu and Xhosa languages loosely means `humanity towards others'. First released in 2004, this software collection is backed by Canonical, a non-profit company founded by Mark Shuttleworth. Mark Shuttleworth made his fortune as a software developer in the dot com era, with a company which was built on free and open software, supplying digital encryption services internationally, primarily to banks. Mr Shuttleworth (who was also the second space tourist, in fact) decided to contribute back to the free and open source software community and Ubuntu was born.
Ubuntu distribution has topped the ranks of Linux distribution down loaded from the internet since its release and is developed by a worldwide community specifically with the ordinary computer user in mind. Indeed, I note that the business card of Mr Paul Schultz says `Linux for human beings'. On behalf of the South Australian Ubuntu users group, I suggest two concepts to promote free and open source software as a way forward. First, that we should open the IT funding criteria. Funding for IT in schools is often focused on acquiring and maintaining software licences. The use of free and open source software allows the spending to be refocussed on education and training.
I note that it has been reported that Indiana is moving 22 000 of its students from Windows to Linux platforms. Secondly, South Australian schools and libraries need somewhere to try out Open Source software. A publicly accessible facility is required where businesses and community groups can test these technologies to learn about whether they are suitable for their purposes. Western Australia, with the Open Source WA Demonstration Centre, and Victoria have both undertaken projects to boot strap their free software sector. It will be great to see something like this in South Australia. I encourage members to try the CDs I have distributed to all their offices today and encourage a further uptake of Open Source software for South Australia, as it represents a real alternative to very expensive systems that Microsoft produces.
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6 comments:
The monopoly that proprietary software has in schools is of concern and this should be mentioned at these political levels as well. Teachers are using words like – “Make a powerpoint”, “Create a Word document”. By and large, students could well leave school believing that Microsoft and Adobe are the only options for their operating systems and application software. For the pleasure of indoctrinating our students we, the tax payers, spend large sums of money in licensing fees.
In addition to that, humans tend to resist change so the tool that we learnt with is likely to be our tool of choice in the future. So our students not only could think that they have no choice, but should they get wind of alternatives, they are going to be reluctant to change anyway. We would call that cornering the market.
Public schools should have the free software on all computers in schools. Proprietary companies might choose to have our students exposed to their product for which they should pay a fee to assist with maintaining their product on the schools’ computers. At the very least, it should be made available to schools for free so that teachers can ‘teach with the free stuff first’ and then expose the students to the costly alternatives later.
Schools should also be teaching students about the value of open data standards so that the products that they create now and into the future are transferable and unencumbered.
Finally, Government groups that are making products for educational use, like learning objects, should be developing these so that they work independent of the program being used to run them. For example, a learning object that will only work with Internet Explorer is not as good as one that will work with any compliant web browser.
Thanks for bringing this speech to our attention.
Thanks Wara. Hopefully we can do something tangible with this idea. The Open Schools Alliance in Scotland looks great.
http://www.openschoolsalliance.org
I have seen you reference this Open Schools Alliance in Scotland via another forum as well.
Forming some sort of action group around this in Australia, or maybe South Australia, is probably a good idea.
Would you be interested in doing an interview with James Purser on the Grant High School?
You folks are doing great stuff =).
http://www.localfoss.org/
James Purser purserj@k-sit.com
Now you're being very scary.
We could probably arrange something ;-)
hehe, ripper =)
purserj is to be found on
#localfoss on irc.freenode.net
He and Karin are good eggs.
Check out their previous podcasts, pretty cruisy folks.
Cheers
Janet
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