23,000 Linux PCs forge education revolution in Philippines

Linux still cheaper than heavily-subsidized Microsoft products
Rodney Gedda
29/01/2008 10:53:27

Providing high school students with PCs is seen as a first step to preparing them for a technology-literate future, but in the Philippines many schools cannot afford to provide computing facilities so after a successful deployment of 13,000 Fedora Linux systems from a government grant, plans are underway to roll out another 10,000 based on Ubuntu.

Visiting Australia to discuss Linux and open source software in education at this year's linux.conf.au in Melbourne, independent open source consultant Ricardo Gonzalez, said there were a number of factors that led to Linux being chosen over the venerable Microsoft Windows.

Gonzalez, based in Manila, told Computerworld Linux became popular in the Philippines soon after the 1997 Asian financial crisis when open source was investigated for its value proposition to organizations.

"Open source was a viable business alternative because no one was doing it commercially," Gonzalez said.

While Gonzalez was teaching the IT dealer network how to profit from open source, Microsoft launched its anti-piracy policy in the Philippines, so he told the government there was an alternative.

Also at the time, the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department of Education launched the PCPS program, or PCs for Public Schools with the aim of providing one PC for each of the 10,000 public high schools in the country.

With funding from the Japanese government, the PCPS program started around the 2000 timeframe when the contractors installed Windows PCs, but five years later it was discovered a lot of the computers were not being used because nobody knew how to use them.

A company by the name of Advanced Solutions Inc (ASI) asked Gonzalez to come on board as a consultant as it was preparing to do bids for 1000 schools. However, this time it would not be only desktops, but one server, 10 desktops, and Internet connectivity in every school.

"We wanted to use Fedora 5 and it went all the way to office of [the Filipino] President and they kept passing it around saying 'why would they offer something for free, and how would they support and teach it'," Gonzalez said. "The project dragged on for four to five months to a point where Microsoft matched the price by offering Windows XP for $US20 a copy and throwing in Office for $US30, but we still came out cheaper. Microsoft was also providing free training to high school teachers."

After "jumping through all the hoops", including having the Department of Science and Technology evaluate the Linux solution for its usefulness, ASI got the contract and all 10,000 computers were delivered at the end of December, 2007.

"Because we saved so much we gave the government 3000 additional units, so now another 300 schools have Linux networks," Gonzalez said.

However, the Philippines' Linux education story is just beginning and the "reward" for the successful initial deployment was before Gonzalez left for linux.conf.au, the company got the contract to do another 1000 high schools over the next 12 months.

"The flavour this time is Kubuntu and Edubuntu," he said, adding the old questions about Linux's suitability aren't being asked any more. "They have also asked us to install the Joomla! and Drupal content systems on the server so students can create content," he added.

"People in the government now understand Linux can do so much for so little outlay"

ASI had initially requested the then IBM, now Lenovo, to factory-install the Linux images, but Gonzalez said since IBM had no experience with Linux deployments, and there were too many errors, some 60 percent of the operating system images had to be deployed after the PCs arrived.

"We were only three people, but during the next contract they put in more people to make sure it gets out the door faster - they doubled it to six people," he said. "There will be a phase four, five and six -- it just depends on funding."

With 7000 islands in the Philippines, the task at hand is no mean feat as the team had to install the systems, test them, do integration work, ship the computers out, ensure it was installed correctly, and provide training to the schools' principal and head of IT.

"If you look at it from a third-world perspective I'm very pleased," Gonzalez said. "For us it's one of the biggest Linux installations in the Philippines. The question is if it's free does it work, but with Linux it does work and it's free."

Gonzalez believes the project has helped begin a mindset revolution for accepting the power of free software.

"People in the government now understand Linux can do so much for so little outlay," he said. "In a brand new computer 50 percent goes to the operating system and office suite, so how many people can afford that?"

When asked why the popular One Laptop Per Child, which ships with Linux, was not used instead, Gonzalez said at the time it was not feasible due to the sheer number of units that needed to be purchased all at once.

To analyze the results of the program, Gonzalez is conducting a survey and he intends to study the flow-on effects to people's home computers, which may take some time to eventuate.

"There are 80 million Filipinos who are sending 20 million text messages so I'm thinking how to get SMS into the education market and tie it down with open source," he said. "I'm looking for the guy who has already done that."

Regarding the country's universities, Gonzalez said they are very much "tied down" to Microsoft, and course material is still tailored for the proprietary world.

"If Linux and open source wants to take hold in the education market it must deliver course material for high schools and elementary schools."

From Computerworld.com.au

Vive la Ubuntu libre!

Jan. 30, 2008

The Linux desktop may be moving forward slowly in the United States, but it's a vastly different story in Europe. Today, Jan. 30, Chris Kenyon, Canonical's director of business development, announced on a Canonical blog that "the Gendarmerie Nationale [the French national police force] announced the migration of up to 70,000 computers to Ubuntu over the next three years."

This move is part of a steady progression that the Gendarmerie Nationale has been making from proprietary to open-source programs.

The Gendarmerie, which approximates the U.S.'s FBI, had already moved from Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office to Firefox and OpenOffice.

The Gendarmerie's PCs are currently running Windows XP. The French government, however, has decided that Linux, rather than Vista, is the more affordable upgrade path. France's National Assembly is already running desktop Linux.

In an AFP (Agence France-Presse) report, Col. Nicolas Geraud, deputy director of the Gendarmerie's IT department, said, "We will introduce Linux every time we have to replace a desktop computer, so this year we expect to change 5,000 to 8,000 to Ubuntu and then 12,000 to 15,000 over the next four years so that every desktop uses the Linux operating system by 2013-2014."

There are three specific reasons why the Gendarmerie is making the Linux switch. These are: to free the agency from being locked in to one vendor: Microsoft; enable the force's IT department to have complete control of the operating system, and, last, but never least, cut down costs.

According to the AFP story, Geraud said that France will save more than 7 million Euros, approximately $10.3 million, a year by using Ubuntu instead of Windows.


Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

From desktoplinux.com

Your PC's Been Arrested—Now What?

01.01.08
If anyone misuses your network, guess who's liable?

by Oliver Rist

It's a typical Monday morning, except after you saunter into the office sipping Starbucks, the door flies open behind you and a flurry of federal badges rush into reception with warrant paperwork. Turns out Elliott in sales has been downloading child pornography. Or maybe Grant in accounting has been skimming a few dollars off every customer bank transfer. Or perhaps Elaine in receivables has been running a long-standing overbilling scheme.

If this moment is the first time you've considered how to respond to a cyber law-enforcement incident, you're certainly not in the best position. But don't panic—even a surprised business manager can save the day. Follow these five steps to shield your business from a potential legal disaster.

1. ENFORCE YOUR COMPANY'S EXISTING FAIR USE, DATA RETENTION, AND PRIVACY POLICIES TO THE LETTER. Documents like these aren't just lawyer fodder. They're designed to discourage your employees from committing cybercrime in the first place. Every employee must be briefed on these policies and should have easy access to them. Deviating from your policies for any reason sends the wrong message. Stick to your guns.

2. TALK TO A LAWYER—FIRST. Peter Brill of the Brill Legal Group, a New York–based criminal defense firm with eight years of cybercrime experience, says that most corporate law firms today employ at least one attorney familiar with cybercrime. Find out who that lawyer is at the firm you deal with and make him or her your first call after encountering any kind of trouble. It's a good idea to talk to this attorney before disaster strikes, too, about screening employees (so the company can't be held negligent) and what the best steps would be in an emergency.

3. DON'T DESTROY THE EVIDENCE. If you're the one who happens on Elaine's overbilling scheme, there are two things Brill maintains are paramount: First, don't destroy anything. Odds are she's already under investigation somewhere, and if your fingerprints are discovered on a smashed hard disk or a file-deletion audit trail, you're going to jail right along with her, even if you were just trying to protect your livelihood. Second, remember that your first "crime scene" conversation shouldn't be with the cops or with Elaine. It's with your lawyer and only your lawyer.

4. HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY. For the business owner or manager, being honest with whatever law-enforcement agency winds up handling the case is definitely the best approach. "The FBI, for example, doesn't like shutting down businesses," says Brian Chee, lab director at the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory at the University of Hawaii and also an acting university information-systems security officer. Grabbing an immediate backup snapshot of your servers, say, and then spiriting it off-site in case the FBI decides to walk out with hard disks or servers can land you in a lot of trouble. "Talk to them," says Chee, "and generally they'll work with you to take what they need while making sure your business can stay up and running."

5. PUT YOUR DISASTER-RECOVERY PLAN INTO ACTION. Yeah, the Feds kicking down your door qualifies as a disaster. While some cybercrime incidents involve simply taking one workstation away and putting one miscreant employee into handcuffs, others can make a much greater dent in your company's productivity. If the Feds walk out with several workstations and servers, for example, or declare the entire office a crime scene for x number of days, it can all but cripple an unprepared business. If this happens, fall back on your disaster-recovery plan—your business has one, right? Make sure guilt-free employees have a place to work, even if you need to organize a telecommuting phase. Acquire replacement servers and populate them with the most recent off-site backup. All standard disaster-recovery stuff. "The key is not to panic," says Chee. Sure, it's not a "standard" disaster, but keeping your response orderly is the best way to assuage employee fear, maintain customer calm, and keep the business running.

Farewell, Netscape, but I Suppose It's Time

By: P.J. Connolly

The holidays aren't really the holidays without a ghost of years past, and in 2007, the ghost was called Netscape.
When I heard that AOL had pulled the plug on the Netscape Web browser, I was less surprised by the news than by the revelation that the company was still maintaining it.

At the risk of betraying my age, let's just say that I've been around the track a few times, and I remember when the rumors surfaced in 1993 of a graphical Web browser that was being worked on at the University of Illinois' main campus. As a Northwestern grad, I wasn't sure that the farm boys could make it work, but I was happy to be proven wrong.

In those days, I was the IT manager of a daily legal newspaper in San Francisco, and a year or so before, my proposal for a dedicated connection to this thing called the "Internet" that would aid our writers and editors in research—and to be honest, I was looking forward to using it myself—had been unceremoniously shot down as a waste of money. But when the whispers of a browser called "Mosaic" became a buzz, all of a sudden I was on the hot seat.

Perhaps one of the things that saved some of us in those days was that HTML was just another markup language. I'd been monkeying with 1980s-vintage typesetters and publishing software for several years at that point, so a lot of the early process of putting copy up on the Web was a simple matter of changing the macros that set up the formatting strings. After all, XML is just SGML with better marketing, isn't it?

Honestly, in 1994 it was more exciting to have a connection nailed up than it was to make something render attractively on a Web page. But the standards were lower then, and the bandwidth sucker that became Flash was still a dream.

Time passed and Microsoft got its act together—on the fourth try. Like most of the computing community, I became tired of the bugs in Netscape Navigator, and eventually realized that Internet Explorer worked "well enough." (At least, it did for Windows.)

Even though much of the Netscape Navigator legacy lives on in Mozilla Firefox, it's not the same thing. Like the child who surpasses the parent's achievements, Firefox is the browser that Netscape should have built.

So the story ends a couple of weeks from now, when AOL officially ends support, and since it's been a decade since Netscape was relevant, I guess it was overdue. But that doesn't make it any easier to say goodbye to an old friend, no matter how long it's been since you had any fun together.