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Comment by romantomjak | Hacker News Reader

To play the devil’s advocate - I reckon it’s all to do with support. If something breaks they can just pick up the phone and tell them to sort it out. What will they do when a random open source program breaks? Open a github issue?

I’m also sure deals like that come with other goodies, for example, my university offered free, licensed windows, office & visual studio installations.

Also, electronics course had windows-only software that we all had to use.

I’m sure it’s not that easy to switch. There must be deals on deals upon deals depending on where the school budget comes from and who approves it and so on.

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> I reckon it’s all to do with support. If something breaks they can just pick up the phone and tell them to sort it out.

You must have a very different experience with getting support for proprietary software than I do.

You can spend four- and five-figures per seat per year on CAD software, and still only get canned responses suggesting you uninstall and reinstall. You can license Google Docs for 2000 employees, doesn't mean you can get a single easily reproducible bug fixed.

If you don't buy support for software, you're the support team.

Maybe that's something a savvy teacher is willing to take on for a small, advanced class where the students largely know what they're doing, or at least have a reasonable baseline of prior education.

It certainly doesn't scale when we're talking school wide software, tiny IT teams and dozens of thousands of students & and hundreds of faculty of varying levels of computer literacy all bringing their own devices.

I guess it depends on if you have a strong enough IT team to provide that support or not. I doubt many schools, or even large corporations do.

The #1 platform in schools is Google.

Google doesn't provide support either.

Or to be specific, there is a support email with obnoxious, egoistic minimum wage drones who make Comcast look great. There are all sorts of broken self-serve automated systems too. Empowered employees capable of understanding what they're talking about? They do their best to shield them from customers.

Google stuff mostly works. When it doesn't, you're mostly SOL. It's like that even if you pay for the fancy enterprise stuff.

Microsoft has support. They're also nowhere close to being the #1 platform in schools. Apple has support. Ditto.

If you don't pay for support, you will get what you paid for. This is orthogonal to whether the software is Free or non-Free.

If you've ever heard of Red Hat, they were a Free software support organization that became an international success story with a multi-billion-dollar valuation. They are not the only ones out there.

In short, what they'd do if there's a problem is pick up the phone to whoever is contracted to provide support service, and expect support.

In the words of neil stephenson:

"If your tank breaks down, we'll send engineers to your house to fix it for you while you sleep!"

Proprietary software support is a lie. Arlo is so incompetent, they can't even bill me. Seriously. I go to buy something in their app, and it gives me an error. I file a support ticket, say I have money and I want to buy something. Tell multiple people via web and phone that I want to buy something but the interface is broken. It's been about a month now. I just checked. It's still broken. They really dont give a shit their billing system is broken. These people are clowns.

My goal would be to provide open source educational software with paid support and hosted options at an affordable price point.

From what I've seen recently, the school district and board really work hard towards providing the best educational product at the lowest cost. For example, switching hardware from a Windows laptop to a Chromebook meant we saved money on both the hardware contracts and support. But justifying $20k+ for the cost of a software license for a HR module in the educational equivalent of PeopleSoft is harder, even when the district has projected that we will save more than the cost of the software in the long run.

This point is lost on stallmanists. They still live with assumption that every user is a programmer or at least very interested in _controlling_ the software. No. Majority just want to use the software for whatever they need it to. Writers just want to write books, digital artists just want to paint, etc.

You can call me a "stallmanist" if you like, but this point has been explained many times in the essays of Stallman. In short: No one has to be a programmer. Free software allows you to hire anyone to work on your software, just like with car repairs.

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