 oes free software that improves technology-based learning and saves billions of dollars for education sound like an impossible dream? Thanks to a rapidly growing movement based on an operating system that many refer to as "GNU/Linux5," realization of that dream may be closer than you think.
What are its advantages? The GNU/Linux16 operating system is smaller, more reliable, more extensible, and faster than Windows NT, Windows 98, or the Macintosh OS. It offers capabilities that Apple and Microsoft have only promised to deliver. Fully half the Web servers on the Internet are running on the free software Apache7, which is based on GNU/Linux. And programmers working cooperatively over the Internet all over the world have developed many other packages of free software as well.
One group refers to this kind of software as Open Source, but the originator of the movement Richard Stallman prefers the term Free Software. To be inclusive, we use the name Free Open Source Software (FOSS) to refer to software with source code that can be modified and freely redistributed. Programs whose source code is available to users - for modification, improvement, or just plain curiosity - and which is free of charge would clearly benefit the education sector.
Recent Developments
Public acceptance and enthusiasm for GNU/Linux is on the upswing. In the last few months, GNU/Linux has been featured in The New York Times8 newspaper and magazine, Forbes9, Scientific American10 and on National Public Radio11. In February, protesters who use FOSS operating systems rallied at Microsoft offices demanding a refund on the unused copies of Windows that came pre-installed on their PCs.
Corporate and investor interest in GNU/Linux is growing, too. Not only has the publicity made GNU/Linux, and by extension all FOSS, more acceptable to the public, it has resulted in investment funding for companies such as Red Hat12 and VA Research13 that will lead to healthy competition in technical support services. GNU/Linux users will now have inexpensive options for technical support (though much support is also available via the virtual support circle of other GNU/Linux aficionados).
The acceptance of FOSS is important because it challenges the conventional wisdom that free software is unsupported, and therefore, useless. In fact, many of the most important elements of a FOSS system are supported and updated at a level far above that of commercial software. Greater acceptance could generate support for publishing educational software as FOSS. Educational funders often insist that projects generating educational software find a publisher to disseminate the software, even if they charge exorbitant prices. The well-founded fear is that by placing software in the public domain for free (otherwise known as "freeware"), no upgrades or ports would ever be made and the software would become obsolete as soon as the technology moves on. The fallacy in this argument is the assumption that making the software free and open source is equivalent to placing it in the public domain and providing it free. A key element usually incorporated into FOSS software licenses is that if modifications or improvements are made these changes must also be made available to the community under a FOSS license such as the GNU Public License14 (GPL)26. A FOSS license provides an alternative that ensures a continued life for the software. This subtle but crucial difference is the legal and ethical underpinning which helps create trust and cooperation among far-flung programmers. No one is afraid that their code will be ripped off for profit; in fact, often there is a healthy competition to see who can write the best code.
Until recently, FOSS has been associated with operating system software only, but this is changing rapidly. System software is just the beginning. In addition to the Netscape browser, there are now FOSS spreadsheets, word processors, a presentation package (similar to PowerPoint™), and Gimp16, an image manipulation program that is similar to Photoshop™. There are thousands of applications being developed including some primitive educational tools.
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Glossary of Terms
Free Open Source Software (FOSS) is our nondenominational attempt to clarify the open source code and free labels; it refers to programs that are both open source (you can see and modify the source code), freely available and sometimes free of charge.
GNOME is a graphical user interface - in other words, a desktop environment, being developed by the Free Software Foundation. KDE is a competing free desktop environment.
GNU (Gnu's Not Unix) is a free software system that is upwardly compatible with Unix.
Java is a programming language designed by Sun Microsystems for cross-platform functionality.
Linux is the kernel of an operating system developed as a variant of the UNIX operating system. Together with GNU, it is a reliable operating system, known as Linux-based GNU System or GNU/Linux.
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Educational Uses
At the founding of The Concord Consortium over four years ago, we selected GNU/Linux as the operating system for our email, ftp and web hosting. It has proven to be stable, high performing, and easy to maintain.
The current educational value of GNU/Linux is limited, however. Because it is unlikely that many students and teachers would want to use raw GNU/Linux, its main application today is in back rooms where network servers live. While this might reduce the cost of software for these computers and improve their reliability, it would not represent a major savings for schools, who need relatively few servers and whose operating systems are a small expense compared to hardware, networking, and support costs.
But now that GNU/Linux is soon to have two graphical user interfaces (GUI) and extensive support, it could begin to have a major impact on education. The KDE17 and GNOME18 graphical user interfaces look similar to traditional desktop environments using a mouse to control moment and sizing of windows, for instance, conventions with which PC and Mac users alike are familiar. While impressive, GNOME is under development and not ready for general use. However, given the pace of development, we anticipate only months - not the usual years of software development - before a free stable graphical user interface is available.
 When a good graphical user interface exists for powerful and reliable productivity and educational packages, the benefits to schools will become substantial. Because FOSS software can be freely distributed, a school that built its technology use around general-purpose FOSS tools and Java applications could make these tools available to everyone in the school community, including parents. For those running GNU/Linux, this would increase student and community access to technology while reducing school software and support costs.
It would also reduce the support costs associated with tracking licensed software and moving limited quantities between classrooms as needed. FOSS software could also reduce hardware costs because it is relatively compact and can run on older, perhaps donated, computers. Once free open source software matures, it will be quite stable, so its use might also reduce technical support costs. The combination of these factors could, in a few years, add up to significant savings for education, while offering better reliability and new educational benefits.
Commercial Software vs. FOSS?
Commercial educational software can exist along with FOSS, so education will be best served by a combination of FOSS and commercial software. The FOSS strategy works because a large community of programmers is willing to undertake software development and knowledgeable users contribute support. By not being proprietary, free open source software encourages elegant problem solving and local and international cooperation. Since many programmers get no financial return for their improvements, most contributed FOSS is created to solve real-world problems faced by programmers, e.g., a student needs a new function for a thesis or a company needs to support infrared ports.
Educational publishers, however, will continue to produce and support specialized educational software. They will simply add GNU/Linux to the operating systems they support. Already, Blackboard19, a commercial online course authoring and delivery system, runs with GNU/Linux. Most educational software is now being written in Java because it is the best dual platform (i.e., Windows and Mac) development environment. Because there is a FOSS Java interpreter, all the present and future educational software written in Java will run with GNU/ Linux, whether FOSS or commercial.
Other powerful educational applications like Logo20, HyperCard, and probeware are likely to follow. A package of software modules that support student records, individualized assignments, and electronic portfolios could be generated in FOSS.
In essence, an educational strategy that relies on FOSS software should depend primarily on general-purpose tools. Because the number of tools is limited and the tools themselves are general, teachers can integrate them widely in the curriculum. From the perspectives of both educational reform and the cost of support, this is a sound educational strategy.
Next Steps
The time is now ripe to launch a research and development effort to bring the benefits of free open source software to education in a timely manner and to evaluate its impact. While FOSS may not yet be ready for large-scale implementation, it is almost certain to be there soon. It is important to have research results available at that time that can help guide educators and answer the inevitable questions about the cost and educational value of widespread use of FOSS in education. It may also be possible to stimulate the creation of a programmer group interested in creating and maintaining free open source software for education.
Three initiatives are needed. The first would create pilot implementations of FOSS to better understand the total costs and benefits of institution-wide use of this type of software. A second would support increased educational use of FOSS by harvesting the available free open source software and supporting its use in education. The third would stimulate the development of quality free software for education by engaging the programming community in creating needed software.
Initiative One:
Create Pilot Implementations
A few ambitious colleges and school districts should be extensively supported in early and wide implementations of FOSS. Institutions serving poorer populations might benefit most from savings. The goal of these pilot projects would be to gain operational experience that would be widely useful.
Pilot studies are important because educational technology is intimately related to the intellectual and educational life of institutions. The shift to FOSS may involve corresponding shifts in the kinds of software promoted and the educational strategies used. Because there will be fewer compatible educational titles, educators will have to abandon software written before Java became the dual development platform of choice. This means a shift to educational use of FOSS general-purpose tools or software written in Java that might be commercial or free.
Such extensive change will be more of a liability at institutions already making sophisticated and varied use of educational technology than at poorer institutions just starting to use technology. Many effective school technology plans support the use of a limited number of software titles; schools can implement a few broadly and deeply rather than a greater number, but only for a shallow application.
Institutions pilot testing FOSS will need extensive technical support, teacher professional development, and tool-based curriculum materials. They will need to revise their plans for integrating technology into education around the strengths and weaknesses of FOSS. Their teachers will need assistance in creating activities that take advantage of general tools and the Java applications available. Their technical staff will need support to make the changes.
The pilots will need to be carefully observed and evaluated. To understand the actual savings, a thorough accounting will be needed to determine the full costs of traditional approaches and the pilot implementations.
Initiative Two:
Increase Educational Use of FOSS
There is a need to harvest the available free open source software and support its widespread use in education. This would involve providing tested and easily installed distributions of FOSS software of particular interest to educators. As the FOSS movement expands, there will be an increasing deluge of software of variable educational value and technical quality. Sifting through this for applications that are solid both educationally and technically will be beyond the capacity of most schools or colleges. A central operation is needed that can provide a combination of educational and technical guidance. The educational guidance would involve suggesting new programming projects and evaluating those under way. Technical guidance would ensure the quality and compatibility of the resulting code.
This technical service might also involve the creation of some new applications. For instance, being able to generate x-y graphs from a spreadsheet is very important in education. The available FOSS spreadsheets may not have any graphing capacity, but could be easily hooked into a FOSS grapher. An effort to collect and distribute educational FOSS should include hybrids like this when educational needs are recognized.
Initiative Three:
Develop Quality Software
The most speculative effort, but one with the biggest potential payoff, would involve attempting to enlist volunteers in the creation of educational FOSS software. If the same altruistic instincts that have led thousands of programmers to create GNU/Linux can be harnessed for education, there could be an avalanche of free educational software.
Rewards and a seeding effort might be all that is needed to unleash a software effort that would easily surpass all programming currently being done in education.Rewards might involve the recognition of outstanding contributions to education. It is probably also necessary to contribute as well as harvest software. A seed educational effort, bringing programmers to the pilot schools and colleges for summers or one-year stints, would be an ideal - though clearly ambitious - plan. This could generate useful applications and attract much wider interest in the idea of developing free open source educational applications.
Conclusion
These three initiatives could yield huge dividends for education. Annual U.S. educational technology costs are projected at $6-25 billion and 20-25% of that is software. If FOSS were to halve or even quarter the cost of software, it could save anywhere from $300 million to $1.5 billion a year. Another way to look at that savings is that if only a fraction of that money were used to research, test, develop, and adapt FOSS to education uses, the quality and suitability of software would improve enormously.
If this software required less support, less teacher training, and ran on less expensive computers, these savings would be higher still. If the availability of quality Free Open Source Software increased student, teacher, parent, and community acceptance and use of technology, the positive results would be incalculable. These gains could be important to many schools, but at poor schools and schools in developing countries it might make the difference between having and not having adequate educational resources to prepare students for the Information Age.
Robert Tinker is president of The Concord Consortium. Bob@concord.org21
1GNU/Linux is a term that refers to the work done by GNU(Ga-new), a project organized in the 1980's by Richard Stallman that made operating system components that extended the UNIX operating kernel and an alternative free kernel called Linux (LINN-ex) developed in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. The resulting GNU/Linux combination is popularly known as the Linux operating system. We choose to call in GNU/Linux, although we acknowledge that others have differing views.
2The GPL requires that anyone can use the software without charge, provided any improvements made are protected with the GPL copyright.
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