"23,000 Linux PCs forge education revolution in Philippines"

Interesting news from our neighbour Philippines - it was a two page article in the August edition of Computerworld Malaysia, page 18 entitled: "Open Education". I tried to search for the article in computerworld.com.my, but failed to get any results. However Google worked, and here is the article published online by Computerworld Australia: "23,000 Linux PCs forge education revolution in Philippines"

Here are some interesting bits of information:

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.

There goes the myth that Windows is friendly and everybody knows how to use them. When it comes to education, its the first opportunity to teach kids how to do things. Not get them ingrained in only one way of doing things on one product.

Ricardo 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."

So even when Microsoft Philippines was authorised to slash prices (with questionable sales tactics of 70-90% discounts) for this project, Microsoft was still the more expensive option. Its funny because when it comes to the education of kids, there is no mythical "migration" costs, and therefore Microsoft's standard arguments of Total Cost of Ownership studies with retraining goes right out the window. In a few years, Microsoft will become even more expensive because of the "migration" costs from Linux to Windows X, and I wonder if that will be a factor in their TCO studies.

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

From an initial contract of 10,000 units, Gonzalez provided 3,000 additional units. I don't know about you, but I'd figure that a 30% surplus in deliverables is certainly a key indication that Open Source is key in providing great value. What do you think?

The key part of the article to me is this soundbyte from Gonzalez:

"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 you have a proprietary OS and the office suite factored into the price, it does come up to 50% of a price of a new computer. Why should this be the case, especially in developing countries in Asia? I highlighted this in my complaint on the Microsoft Tax post a few weeks ago.

23,000 computers deployed by a 3 man team is certainly phenomenal. Lets see of other countries around the region are moving in this direction especially in the education sector, where in the long term it matters most.

Well done, Ricardo Gonzalez!

yk.

Comments

[Frank Daley]

And presumably the success of Ricardo Gonzalez and his team have led to the recent announcement by Microsoft that it is opening an open source interoperability lab in September in Quezon City >
http://www.gmanews.tv/story/112115/Microsoft-launches-open-source-lab-in-RP

Microsoft and open source interoperability! Yes, that means Microsoft takes, but gives back nothing.

Let's hope Filipino IT people aren't as gullable as Microsoft expects them to be.

[Stormy]

The GNOME Foundation will be holding its first event in Asia, http://gnome.asia. We'd love to have representation from people rolling out Linux and GNOME in Malaysia - is there someone I could talk to?

[kaeru]

@Stormy I suggest you contact the person for Mr. Mohsin from Melaka City Council, they're targeting for 100% Linux desktops. Currently they're using a customised version of Ubuntu. Contact details are available in the link to the case study in the blog posting.

[gerald gene a. garduce]

The article was good and that is true that nowadays since we are in the world of modernization, we need to uplift the quality of education here in the Philippines by means of computer education.