Is there a single school, college, or university left that doesn't rely on Microsoft or Google for emails, calender, etc?
Inside the US, no, those corporations have captured everything.
They would never use free software, because they can't sign contracts or draw guarantees from free software organizations. Besides, most school technicians are not trained into it.
I still remember a lab technician (Early 2010s) struggling to make VLC work on all computer lab computers (And she still never managed to)
@vokainen099 My Dad works in public education. The distract he worked for switched to Gmail a decade ago because of some law that required emails to be stored on their servers for 7 years and they didn't have the infrastructure to handle that.
It probably was a gift to keep those corporations afloat, since it was easy to guess schools would be forced to rely on their services most of the time (Alas, transfer public money to them)
Email in particular, even if they had the infrastructure, it probably wouldn't work because of all those antispam safeguards google is enforcing
ひげ
@wowaname @vokainen099 @xianc78 yeah schools being able to afford 200 macs, 400 PCs, a dozen carts full of chromebooks, etc. but not being able to hold emails for 7 years seems a little weird to me.
Probably they just threw the towel
Also, those 100s of PCs are bought in batches with discounts
Edit: Also google anti-spam practices requiring DKIM and things like that
But, from a business perspective, school boards would just offshore everything to google to get whatever full package discount they can get (And maybe pocket the difference)
We reason as technologists, they reason (Badly) as businessmen
And, if something happens, they can offshore legal inquiries at google. Can't do that with free software.
>they can't sign contracts or draw guarantees from free software organizations.
i'm someone interested in bridging this gap, but nobody gave me enough interest to support my direction, and i never had enough money in my pocket to put toward initial funding myself.
@wowaname @vokainen099
>i'm someone interested in bridging this gap, but nobody gave me enough interest to support my direction, and i never had enough money in my pocket to put toward initial funding myself.
And the worst part about it is that there are organizations that could do it but choose not to. Disroot has been around for a decade now, runs on entirely free software, and is funded 100% by donations (some features are ONLY available if you donate though), but their ToS prohibits commercial use of their services with a few exceptions. I understand not wanting huge corpos using your service, but I see no problem with small businesses using it.
"oh cool my office license also includes TEAMS time to shove this shit on people"
@xianc78 From an enterprise perspective, why wouldn't you?
education sector can get away with more, but from a budgeting standpoint, it makes no sense to put more money in google's pocket, especially considering how your whole staff have to receive training on how to use gsuite in the first place. do the numbers.
@wowaname @xianc78 What about security or the potential of being blocked by #Office365 or #GMail servers?
>security
hire me or someone else who has done this for years.
>failure to deliver
solved problem. they aren't that hard to get whitelisted for delivery.
just don't ignore this shit, as a CTO
