F/LOSS ICT Infrastructure
ICT plays an important role in education sector as it helps increase
the quality of the education provided and also facilitates the delivery
of business objectives (MCEETYA,
2003) but education sector faces
financial constraints along with sharing the resources for other things.
Education sector has hence not been able to get the full benefit of ICT (Tong,
2004). Digitisation has already captured and transformed the educations
industry. To catch up with it, education
sector requires an ICT infrastructure and to compete with the rest of the world
they have to rely on proprietary software vendors. It becomes more expensive
for the education sector to use proprietary software while they are already
dealing with the financial constraints (Lakhan and Jhunjhunwala, 2008). With the introduction of F/LOSS though,
the ICT cost can be highly reduced and higher quality of education can be
provided (Tong, 2004).
F/LOSS is available free from
the internet and is also available in CD’s for a nominal cost. The initial cost
for acquiring F/LOSS is so much minimal and also education sectors don’t need
to pay extra cost for installing it in all of the other computers. Because of
its reliability, performance and security the system administrative prefer F/LOSS. F/LOSS community has plenty of users and
developers spread all over the world, hence the bugs are not only identified
quickly but fixed once it’s reported. Also in developing countries, F/LOSS has
gained popularity is all different sectors and there has been a need for the
graduates familiarise themselves with the F/LOSS concept. Implementation of
F/LOSS in education sector can be hence seen as a must for the brighter future
of the students. While most of the available operating system and software are
available in English, developing nations (non English speaking countries) can
benefit from localisation and F/LOSS has made this process possible. Great innovations
have been found in Universities that uses F/LOSS applications not only as
scientific research but also as a hobby. One of the best examples for this is
Linux system itself. Once gained a copy of F/LOSS, it can be freely copied and
distributed. Using F/LOSS by the Education sector would encourage students to
avoid the proprietary software when they are in home (Tong, 2004).
When the question of infrastructures of ICT arises, server is the most
essential part. F/LOSS software is the most effective software that provides
the service that server offers (Tong, 2004). Sendmail and Postfix are among the
most popular F/LOSS email servers. For file and print services, samba
fits in probably as the best F/LOSS application allowing secure, stable and
fast print services (Samba, n.d.). Apache is the most renounced web server. It
is one of the most popular F/LOSS software and it is used to host public
websites (Mockus et al., 2002). The Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP)
is a flexible, cost effective solution to set up desktop workstations. LTSP
clients can be used to use internet and other desktop applications (LTSP,
2009). In computing laboratory, library the operating system and application
are installed in each and every computer. Instead of doing so, it is effective
to use thin client; which are computers with just keyboard, mouse, monitor,
graphics card and network card. The server on the other hand has all the other
requirements; i.e. hard disk, CD/DVD ROM and operating system. It is necessary
for this server to be powerful as it has to handle the entire computing task
(Tong, 2004). So LTSP saves time, cuts cost and is easily maintainable. For thin clients, recycled computers can be
used as they meet the specification when used with F/LOSS software. When it
comes to handling thousands of workstation then Linux management tools is not a
viable option (Derringer, 2009). Powers (2007) has suggested that when LTSP
offers so much cost savings on the software and some hardware parts, the client
should pay attention while getting the other required parts for the
functionality purpose. These economically sustainable computer labs based on
LTSP has been set up in various part of developing countries and it has been
accepted and appreciated by almost all of the staffs and students (GIKI, 2008;
S2S2NET, 2009).
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