Microsoft licence mess in Gauteng schools

Thor187 said:
In 2010 there where 30 586 Schools in SA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_South_Africa)

---Speculation---

If 10% of them have a computer room of 40 then it's

3058.6 Schools x 40 PCs = 122 344 PC's

Now take 122 344 x (Windows Licence + Office Licence)

That number is in the ~400 million range... that can be saved if we switch to linux
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Microsoft gives heavy discounts for educational institutions and with bulk buying (which I am hoping they doing) it should be cheaper.

Problem is support and knowledge on open source apps. Windows is at least familiar. In my limited experience people were pretty much stumped when faced with anything non-windows based. One place spend more money on training for open source than they would have paid for windows licencing. They stuck with windows. This experience is anecdotal but I do wonder how widespread the above scenario is.
 
Nefertiti said:
Microsoft gives heavy discounts for educational institutions and with bulk buying (which I am hoping they doing) it should be cheaper.
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How much cheaper? Let's get figures then we can work it out, I am sure there is enough information available online to get a fairly good idea how much money can be saved.


Nefertiti said:
Problem is support and knowledge on open source apps. Windows is at least familiar. In my limited experience people were pretty much stumped when faced with anything non-windows based. One place spend more money on training for open source than they would have paid for windows licencing. They stuck with windows. This experience is anecdotal but I do wonder how widespread the above scenario is.
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I get this part... to an extent. If your a IT teacher and you cant find your way around non windows then maybe teaching IT is not for you.
 
Lament said:
Why cant they just install a free version of Office?, Microsoft is making a huge amount of money with these packages that some freeware packages can can preform equally as well.
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Interoperability is the main reason. Opening and editing .docx files in Writer isn't 100% faultless, and a lot of formatting errors can be made simply by opening up a .docx document, editing it in Writer, and then saving it in a .doc format (on a Linux machine, mind you, so there are already font issues). If the government wants Libre Office in schools, they'll have to put it on every single computer to maintain compatibility and interoperability.

DA-LION-619 said:
MS probably provides a discount and support.
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Unless volume licensing with Microsoft SA hasn't changed in the last six years, I believe there's a discount offered, but no support. That's only available to enterprises, while schools are expected to source their own IT support.

I could be wrong, though. This was the case six years ago when I was working with MS reps on getting my boss' business higher up in the MS Partnership ranks.

Lament said:
Installing Linux is not even a option, last year the "upper powers" decided lets give a few "high end" users Apple machine on request, at the end of the day we had to install Windows on each every single machine.
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Often the IT admin doesn't get a say in the rollout of some machines for particular people, so they get stuck with supporting something that ends up being a pain in the ass. OS X management can be easy and pain-free, it just requires someone skilled enough, along with a Mac Mini working as a OS X server.

Napalm2880 said:
The biggest problem is that they can't even say how many licences they currently have because IT in the government departments is so poorly managed. They end up getting the licence resellers to 'audit' (guess) how many licences are required each year - obviously a conflict of interest because the reseller gets a cut of each licence sold.
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This is probably close to the truth. Additionally, if you're a volume license customer, you have to buy machines installed with Windows 7/8.1/10 Pro, and then replace that license with the one supplied as part of the volume license agreement. I think a lot of techs probably aren't doing this, and are just parking these computers into a domain right off the bat and not caring about the licensing issues.

And then you get BYOD, and the head honcho wants it on his laptop and computer at home, and for his children, yadda, yadda, yadda. It gets out of control really quickly.
 
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Thor187 said:
How much cheaper? Let's get figures then we can work it out, I am sure there is enough information available online to get a fairly good idea how much money can be saved.
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Its done on a case by case basis so I doubt those figures are available online. My info comes via a microsoft person themselves but they didnt specify the amounts unfortunately. Contractual secrecy and what not.

Thor187 said:
I get this part... to an extent. If your a IT teacher and you cant find your way around non windows then maybe teaching IT is not for you.
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you forgot the users, which depending could be the biggest pain in all of this.
 
Nefertiti said:
Its done on a case by case basis so I doubt those figures are available online. My info comes via a microsoft person themselves but they didnt specify the amounts unfortunately. Contractual secrecy and what not.
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Won't be more than half price, so we can use that as a best case scenario and then it's still a few hundred odd million Ronts

Nefertiti said:
you forgot the users, which depending could be the biggest pain in all of this.
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You mean students, school children. They are there to learn. It's the point of them being there so they can learn it.
 
Nefertiti said:
you forgot the users, which depending could be the biggest pain in all of this.
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This.

Also - today's Linux is easier to use than the versions they had back in 2000... but users still have to be trained to process the finer nuances of the Linux desktop.

Such as document portability between OpenOffice/LibreOffice and Microsoft Office....

But a major part of the hurdle from M$ to Open source is :

1. Getting the right support persons
2. Training your staff (for a small company starting up, open source may be the way to go)
3. Most tasks are automated in M$ Office, whereas you'll need to perform additional steps in the open-source counterpart

For me, switching between Linux and Windows is easy, I have no problems with that since I know what to expect.

But it will be a disaster taking somebody who only know Windows and expect said person to work in Linux...
 
Thor187 said:
You mean students, school children. They are there to learn. It's the point of them being there so they can learn it.
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But your arguments above targeted governmental institutions. And we all know what governmental employees are like (with apologies to those who actually give a damn and do their best to make the world a better place with the limited resources at their disposal)....
 
Thor187 said:
Won't be more than half price, so we can use that as a best case scenario and then it's still a few hundred odd million Ronts
You mean students, school children. They are there to learn. It's the point of them being there so they can learn it.
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Well Office is for free for me as a uni student, so I assume it's the same for schools. They just have to pay a largely (I bet it's along the lines of <40%) reduced fee for the OS. You have to take into account by familiarizing the students with the Microsoft products, businesses will buy their products as their employees know how to use it. The schools are not the cash cow, they are the indoctrination centers for Microsoft.

All of this has been stated earlier on the thread.
 
The Gauteng Department of Education (GDE) said that a tender process to appoint a new service provider has caused a delay in issuing schools with new Microsoft licences.

This response followed complaints from public schools that they were struggling to install new Microsoft products as they did not receive working Microsoft licences from the GDE.

The lack of licences means that the schools cannot install certain software to new PCs, or fix old Windows systems, because the old licence codes are no longer valid.

GDE spokesperson Oupa Bodibe confirmed that the department’s licence agreement with Microsoft has expired.

He said recent negotiations with Microsoft have been concluded, and that the department has signed a new agreement with Microsoft for five years.

However, there is a delay in issuing schools with new licences because the department had to follow tender processes to appoint a new service provider.

“The department’s ICT team is in the process of installing the full Microsoft suite of products to all the public schools,” said Bodibe.
 
Beachless said:
You mean the "Policy on Free and Open Source Software use for South African Government" that was initiated in 2003 ish?
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It was something like that, but then Bill Gates visited South Africa. Press was focusing on large donation for the poor, not much about a real deal, but it was end of the story.
 
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Sollie said:
I'd call it a saving grace :)

Google how the educational email issue went down in the USA. Example: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.html

This company has long since dropped it's "Do not be evil" philosophy.
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http://9to5google.com/2015/12/03/google-denies-farming-student-data/
Google responds to student privacy concerns: ‘We are confident that our tools comply with both the law and our promises’
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http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/03/googles-chromebooks-make-up-half-of-us-classroom-devices.html
Chromebook sales now account for more than half of all devices sold for U.S. classrooms, up from less than 1 percent in 2012, according to a new report from Futuresource Consulting. (The sales figures do not include desktop computers.)
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backstreetboy said:
http://9to5google.com/2015/12/03/google-denies-farming-student-data/

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/03/googles-chromebooks-make-up-half-of-us-classroom-devices.html
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Yes, sequence of events. The Student Privacy Pledge was given in 2015 after being exposed for deceptive practices like the one I pointed to, published the previous year.

As pointed out in your article, relating to separate EFF allegations:
Specifically, the group claims that Google is breaching a Student Privacy Pledge that it signed in January.
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However how will that play out in South Africa? We already saw what happened with WozaOnline: Google plus South African government plus South African corporates.
 
system32 said:
LibreOffice + Linux FTW.
Chromebook?
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Chromebooks are easy to support and very simple to administrate, so long as the school has the right setup with Google. No lost documents, no late projects, etc. Office 365 offers the same thing, but with full Office support.

But, of course, that's largely for the students and some teachers. The rest of the school's network will either be based on Windows or Apple.

Johnatan56 said:
Well Office is for free for me as a uni student, so I assume it's the same for schools. They just have to pay a largely (I bet it's along the lines of <40%) reduced fee for the OS.
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Schools ordinarily don't get free software for students, that's only for universities unless the school and Microsoft works on offering the software for free or a reduced price. The way the volume licensing works is that you have to buy a PC pre-loaded with Windows [X] Pro, and then replace the installed license with the volume license which comes with software assurance.

Edit: I see now that Windows 10 volume licensing only offers software assurance on Windows 10 Enterprise, and no longer Windows [X] Pro. There are options to add it to a retail/OEM install, but there's a time limit and extra limitations to it. That's much more convoluted.

Getting Windows 10 Education is a simpler affair for schools with some of Microsoft's changes to education offerings, but I have this gut feeling that whoever is in charge of this process doesn't know how software licensing works.

SammyD said:
Why does this need a tender?
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Perhaps so that Sahara computers can try chip in with a tender that's cheaper than the others. Perhaps the government wants to save on the Windows 10 Pro licenses they'll need to purchase to install on older systems running Vista or XP.

I wonder if the NBMB IT department is still using Windows XP 32-bit installs.
 
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