Benefits of open source in education

There are many benefits of open source software to students, teachers and education institutes. Open source adoption in education shall give each stakeholder control over its computer resources. It shall help one to make informed choices for their future, be it individual or collective. It shall help our societies thrive with collaborative innovation. Let’s delve further…

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Extend lifetime of old hardware

Many Linux distributions as well as open source packages can run quite well on old machines. Schools are always short of funds to afford the latest hardware. But the upgrades in software require hardware upgrades to deliver a good experience. Newer software versions require an upgrade or replacement of old hardware, despite them being in…

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Customise and reuse software

Majority of proprietary software is sold on an as-is basis. Nowadays most software also offer an evaluation period which is a partial safety net for the buyer. However, once you have bought one and you realise that it doesn’t quite do everything you need, you either would like to change to another software or modify…

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Affordable computing at student homes

More the time spent practising at a computer, better is the usage skill. Unfortunately, computer usage skill is measured as the ability to run some popular proprietary software even today. Not every student has access to a sufficiently powerful computer to run such software. As schools across the country include computer skills in the curriculum, parents feel compelled to…

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Lower total cost of ownership (TCO)

Nothing is available for free and nor is open source software. There is a direct or indirect cost for deployment and management of all software. It may be broadly referred to as total ownership cost. Someone will have to be responsible for maintaining the system and applying security and feature updates. This is true for both proprietary…

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