Free and Open Source Software Licencing and Secondary Education in New Zealand Free and Open Source Software Licencing and Secondary Education in New Zealand

FOSS and Secondary Schools 1

Running head: FOSS AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Free and Open Source Software Licencing and Secondary Education in New Zealand

Simon Bridge Faculty of Education University of Auckland

email: [email protected] Typset September 3, 2009 by LATEX 2ε

FOSS and Secondary Schools 2 Abstract Free (libre) and Open Source software, is a replacement for more traditional “commercial” or proprietary solutions in Education. It is being noticed that the rules of engagement with software, informed by the different licencing seems, can influence education goals and outcomes. It is argued that Open Source software is particularly suited to High School learning environments, resulting in rapidly growing FOSS adoption overseas and in New Zealand. By far the bulk of FOSS information and it’s likely impact on the education sectors is anecdotal, non-authoritative, or from non-education sources. With this is mind, there is a need for proper study of this emerging area of development.

FOSS and Secondary Schools 3 Free and Open Source Software Licencing and Secondary Education in New Zealand

Nobody uses computers. What we think of as our computer is the set of pictures and words on the screen which we manipulate with a keyboard and a mouse or their analogs. The computer, then, is a software construct. That software (Windows, Mac OSX, UNIX, and so on) has owners who distribute it to the user with restrictions on how they are used. These restrictions can have an impact on the way information is able to be manipulated with our computers(Chen, 2006). It is through the attempt to create an ITC environment free of these restrictions that FOSS(OSI, 1997)(Raymond, 1997) was developed. The resulting software suites have proved attractive to large computer industry players like IBM, and deployed to high profile business services like the New Zealand Stock Exchange. It is only reasonable that Educators around the World(Goldsborough, 2005) would turn their eyes to this new resource. In New Zealand, Albany Senior College(Wayne, 2009) in Auckland, and Warrington College(Hedquist, 2009) in Otago, have made significant commitments to FOSS while others have taken advantage of Government ICT initiatives in rural areas(Ward, Weston, & Bowker, 2007) such as the Small School Network Upgrade Project. My own association with FOSS started with Redhat Linux 7.1, installed to the University of Auckland Physics Department senior computer lab, as a graduate student. The installation occurred over a vacation period without notice, and all most people noticed was that the desktop was improved. Soon it became apparent that all the tools I needed were at my fingertips and the FOSS-savvy people in the department were a great source of information on how to make the most of this.

FOSS and Secondary Schools 4 I installed Redhat 9 to my home computer, and, for the first time, had all my University tools available at home as well. In the past, license restrictions prevented students taking software home. It was quickly apparent to me that this was A Good Thing but was that true generally? I became more involved with the software freedom movement in 2008 when I spent a lot of time with Richard Stallman on his lecture tour of New Zealand. Since then I have been more politically active in related issues such as S92a/copyright legislation. However, I have always wondered if my experience with FOSS-based learning could be generalised to other fields. Mine, after all, was highly technical. This literature review used the academic databases available to the Faculty of Education Library, and Government sources. This was expanded to include reputable Newspapers and industry magazines, to represent the non-academic perceptions. I hope to show that there is evidence in the literature for a grass-roots adoption of free and open technologies below the tertiary level which has been largely overlooked by the academic community. What is the problem with the usual stuff Apple and Microsoft are unarguably the leading, and most familiar, producers distributors of software to schools. Software generally comes under legal aegis of created works, thus, copyright. All proprietary software is “all rights reserved” and then the user is required to accept the terms of a contract which seeks to remove all other possible rights “under applicable law”, granting sometimes far-reaching privileges to the rights holder. Schools have found this type of software challenging in four main areas: Inflexibility: Teaching methods must be fit to what the purchased solution will allow; (Wilkinson, S., 2002)

FOSS and Secondary Schools 5 Legal complexity: It has been observed that the normal activities associated with learning expose school and student to infringing behaviour(Chen, 2006). New Zealand copyright law was changed, in part, to help educators and learners with this.(Ministry of Economic Development, 2003) The current version(Public Act 27, 2008) is still subject to review. Insecurity School and academic network security is important not only in terms of its impact on privacy and academic freedom, but also on its contribution to the broader problem of malicious botnets. Cyber Incidence Response Capability associated with the US Department of Energy tracks vulnerabilities in software. CIRC list seven critical vulnerabilities in August 2009, five of which relate to popular proprietary software used on the desktop or in servers. These include Adobe’s freeware flash and reader applications(CIRC T216, 2009), and an August 12 patch tuesday reminder to Microsoft Windows users that patching available to cover Multiple vulnerabilities in Microsoft products. Exploit of some of these allows complete compromise of the host.(CIRC T207, 2009) Price: Far the most contentious aspect Proprietary solutions for High Schools in NZ is costing the public purse M$33.9(Mahary, 2007). School administrators would rather have that money for improved hardware, or access to better course materials to help their students learn (Hoffman, 2009). While there are many free-of-price, or freeware applications, these usually come with other restrictions such as advertising or malware, making them unattractive to schools.

FOSS and Secondary Schools 6

Schools need to manage these challenges when considering their ITC strategy. How they choose to do so will impact on the way that the curriculum can be delivered. The ubiquity of proprietary solutions in NZ Schools may mean that many educators assume there is no there approach possible. That’s just what ITC in schools is like. How FOSS is seen to help By comparison, while FOSS is distributed under those same copyrights, the rights holder deliberately releases some of those rights, normally reserved, to the user. Specifically the rights to study the program in order to understand how it works, and to make verbatim or modified copies as they see fit(OSI, 1997). The only proviso is that modified copies must be distributed under the same licence terms. It is as a side effect of this approach and the philosophy behind it, that many of the concerns of schools over proprietary solutions turn out to be addressed by the products of the FOSS model(Chen, 2006). The way that these are addressed represent opportunities for schools to improve on their general ITC delivery, potentially impacting cross-curriculum. Flexibility: The software source code is available so that those suitably motivated can effectively create their own versions of solutions to fit their own problems. The lack of any use restrictions means that solutions designed for another industry are co-opted to education needs. Thus educators are unconstrained by pre-built solutions(Wilkinson, S., 2002). Legality: There are no legal issues restrictive to learning or education in general. The central tenet of free software is that information should be free, and should be protected in the

FOSS and Secondary Schools 7 same way as speech. Security: Leading security experts have long insisted insisted on FOSS for security applications because of the oversight which the programs receive and the resulting record for rapid bug-fixes. Though they warn that while FOSS is necessary for secure software, it is not sufficient for this.(Schneier, 1999) Cost-effective: The acquisition and licence cost of the vast majority of free software is zero. While there are commercial foss products in many of the same markets as commercial proprietary products, schools usually opt for the free/gratis non-commercial products. In the US and the UK, schools have been able to reallocate significant funds to other areas of education. New Zealand Schools benefit from bulk licensing, and may not have access to funds freed by opting for cheaper alternatives. (Hoffman, 2009) The cost is the most discussed motivation for FOSS adoption in overseas schools(NEA, 2009). In New Zealand, Albany Senior college has completely removed proprietary solutions from their school computers(Wayne, 2009), while allowing students to use their own computers on the school network, claiming accessibility and Flexibility as primary motivators. Warrington College principle, Nathan Parker, refers to iWaste and price as principle motivators.(Hedquist, 2009) The Department of Education is rethinking its approach(Gerritson, John, 2009) to paying for school software needs, partially in light of the availability and reputed desirability of open source software, such as OpenOffice.org(McKethan, 2008) in schools.

FOSS and Secondary Schools 8

Some people see these considerations as part of a trend towards school control of their own ITC resources.(Adams, 2009) Private companies like Novell NZ provide FOSS-based infrastructure which works behind the scenes on school networks, for a fee.(Novell, 2009) On the downside: some observers have expressed concerns that FOSS presents unique challenges as well as opportunities.(Johnson, L., 2006) The wider choice between applications in some areas like web tools, confuses policy makers who want to standardise on one solution, while there is a lack of well targeted solutions in other areas, like school administration. Changing platform so completely also requires re-acclimatisation to the computing environment, and rethinking the way ITC resources are used. How schools rise to the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities would form part of a wider study. State of Play A body of literature concerning higher education and FOSS has been identified in the USA(van Rooij, 2008), and the UK has a considerable investment in High School deployment of FOSS with a wealth of anecdotal and more formal case studies. For example, in the UK, the Open Source Schools website (OSS, 2007) collects informal case studies and resource notes, while BECTA has its own, more rigorous, studies(BECTA, 2007) which show strong positive outcomes arising directly from FOSS adoption in High Schools. The USA review(van Rooij, 2008) is more cautious, suggesting that institutions are unwise to adopt Open Source as the development model favours a technology-driven pedagogy at the expense of academic and administration objectives. This, despite all their references pointing to enthusiastic adoption in institutions outside the US.

FOSS and Secondary Schools 9 High profile foss solutions like moodle(Interface, 2009), and OpenOffice.org(McKethan, 2008) have received special attention. Some studies have followed FOSS students into the wider workplace, limited fields like Web Development(Corich, 2008). Hard-data documents in peer reviewed journals are strongly biased to the technologist rather than the educator point of view. A bias also noted in the USA literature review conducted by van Rooj.(van Rooij, 2008) Australian ICT observers have noted the close relationship between FOSS adoption and the emerging cloud computing models(ACER, 2008), which correlates with N.Z.s Albany College adoption of the Google Desktop(Wayne, 2009) with their FOSS packages. However, I have been unsuccessful in locating any study in the academic databases available to the faculty library investigating how schools address the challenges and opportunities apparent to the adoption of FOSS solutions. There is a great wealth of information in the popular press, print and on-line, seems to indicate that this may be a grass-roots movement which has been largely overlooked as a subject of serious academic study by New Zealand Educators. Questions of immediate interest are: 1. How do NZ High Schools rise to the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities afforded from their adoption of FOSS in their school? 2. How does the difference in usage paradigms affect curriculum delivery in NZ High Schools? Conclusion Considering widespread recognition of the importance of FOSS to education at all levels, there is a remarkable lack of academic study of it’s use in pre-tertiary education. This is perhaps due to the time-frames involved, the documents cited above all show

FOSS and Secondary Schools 10 significant increase in FOSS adoption only since 2007. This phenomena is current and growing, providing a worthwhile study of an emerging social dynamic.

FOSS and Secondary Schools 11 References ACER. (2008). Ict trends in education ii. Teacher, 6-12. Adams, G. (2009). Selecting your software future; opting for open source. New Zealand Interface, 16-20. BECTA. (2007). Open source software in schools. retrieved from: http://publication.becta.or.uk/display.cfm?resID=25908. Chen, S.-L. (2006). Freedom as in a self sustainable community: The free software movement and it’s challenge to copyright law. Policy Futures in Education, 4, 337-47. CIRC T207. (2009). Microsoft patch tuesday reminder. Retrieved August 30, 2009, from http://www.doecirc.energy.gov/bulletins/t-207.shtml. CIRC T216. (2009). Multiple vulnerabilities with adobe flash player, adobe reader and acrobat. Retrieved August 30, 2009, from http://www.doecirc.energy.gov/bulletins/t-216.shtml. Corich, S. (2008). Teaching web application development: Microsoft proprietary or open systems? New Zealand Journal of Applied Computing and Information Technology, 12 (1), 17-25. Gerritson, John. (2009). Reprogramming school it funds. New Zealand Education Review, 6, 7-8. Goldsborough, R. (2005). Open source: Free software at a price. Community College Week, 18. Hedquist, U. (2009). School switches to linux, hopes to keep ms funds. Computerworld Magazine.

FOSS and Secondary Schools 12 Hoffman, D. (2009). Budget-stretching ideas. Multimedia and Internet@Schools, May/June. Interface, N. (2009). Making the most of moodle. New Zealand Interface, 27. Johnson, L., L. (2006). Open source software in school libraries. Teacher Librarian, 55-37. Mahary, S. (2007). $33 million computer contract secured for schools. Department of Education press release. McKethan, R. N. (2008). An open source software alternative. Chronicle of Kinesthesiology and Physical Education in Higher Education, 17-19. Ministry of Economic Development. (2003). Digital technology and the copyright act 1004: Policy recommendations. Retrieved August 27, 2009, from http://www.ilsp.gr/homepages/protopapas/apacls.html. NEA. (2009). Nea report card: Forsythe county school district. NEA Today, 12. Novell. (2009). Working with smart computer systems, new zealand’s ministry of education rolled out smart-net, an education-specific server solution based on suse linux enterprise server. Retrieved August 27, 2009, from url=http://www.novell.com/success/new zealand ministry.html. OSI. (1997). The open source definition. Retrieved August 28, 2009, from http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php. OSS. (2007). Open source schools: Web resource. http://opensourceschools.org.uk. Public Act 27. (2008). Copyright (new technologies) amendment act 2008 no 27, public act. Retrieved August 27, 2009, from http: //www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2008/0027/22.0/DLM1122604.html. Raymond, E. S. (1997). The cathedral and the bazaar. Retrieved August 28, 2009, from http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/.

FOSS and Secondary Schools 13 Schneier, B. (1999). Open source and security. Retrieved August 30, 2009, from http://www.schneier.com/cryptogram-9909.html\#OpenSourceandSecurity. van Rooij, S. (2008). Adopting open source software applications in us higher education. Review of Educational Research, 682. Ward, L., Weston, B., & Bowker, T. (2007). School ict network infrastructure upgrade project: Evaluation of early impacts. Retrieved August 27, 2009, from http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/ict/9477. Wayne, E. (2009). Welcome to our machines. The New Zealand Education Gazette. Wilkinson, S., W. B. (2002). Open source software: Freedom to educate. Linking Learners.