Free and Open Source Software

In my last post: It's Not About Free Software, It's About Control and TCO, I made an argument that a model based on software given away for free with all of its source code was not a sustainable model. In the post, I used the term FOSS and defined it incorrectly. My thanks to gnuosphere for pointing this out in a civil manner befitting an education discussion. Gnuosphere also provided this link to the GNU definition of FOSS.

So going back to the original post and altering the definition of FOSS, I think that the model of simply giving away open source software for free is not sustainable, particularly in situations where frequent and disparate updates are required, a situation very common in education. The post was simply a statement that the real benefits are the open nature, the control that exists because of that openness and the lower total cost of ownership that can return real dollars to the instructional budgets of schools.

Watch this video as an example of an Italian organization of schools that replaced Windows and M$FT Office with Linux and OpenOffice to realize a lower TCO with free OSS and lower maintenance fees. Sounds a lot like the model I proposed.