Yet another Microsoft-funded study about open-source software evaluates the comparative cost of open-source software and Microsoft technologies, this time in European schools. The study, which was conducted by Microsoft partner Wipro Technologies, evaluates the performance of Microsoft and open-source software solutions in the contexts of student learning, teacher productivity, administrator productivity, and cost.
The study involved 73 schools in six different European countries and concluded that "Open Source schools spend less money per PC on operating systems and productivity software than their Microsoft counterparts," but "Microsoft products were less expensive to manage and maintain than Open Source alternatives."
The study has some questionable elements, however. Although a reasonable balance of open-source schools and Microsoft schools were polled for five of the six countries, no open-source schools were polled in the UK. "Despite exhaustive recruitment efforts, Wipro was unable to gain the participation of any UK OSS schools," reads the study. "Wipro's research recruitment experience indicates that the adoption of OSS solutions in UK schools is presently, very limited."
That claim caught my interest, because I remember a study conducted by the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency in 2005 which evaluated 48 schools—including 15 that were primarily using open-source software—and concluded that schools could reduce acquisition, maintenance, support, and training costs by as much as 20 to 50 percent by using open-source software.
So why are the researchers conducting the Microsoft-funded study having such a hard time finding schools that are using open-source software? The exact standards used to determine which schools are "OSS schools" is never disclosed. It could also have something to do with a sponsorship deal established between Microsoft and the UK Department of Education that has been a subject of criticism and is said to broadly stifle adoption of open-source software in UK schools. The UK is quickly becoming a battleground for this comparative work.
Windows saves money... compared to itself
To further investigate the validity of the cost-savings argument put forth in the Microsoft-funded study, I decided to look at the UK case study provided alongside the actual report. The UK case study focuses on Whitchurch Middle School, and reports that the school was able to significantly reduce reliance on third-party support (resulting in a 65 percent annual savings) by migrating to Windows XP and Active Directory. That rather impressive statistic made me wonder what Whitchurch was using before they migrated to Windows XP and Active Directory. It wasn't open source software. "Prior to the Windows XP and Microsoft Active Directory (AD) deployment in 2006, WMS's PC population consisted of a mix of the Microsoft Windows 98 and Microsoft Windows 2000 operating systems," says the report. "For PC administration, Microsoft Group Policy Editor (GPE) was used to manage PC profiles."
The Whitchurch case study, which is titled "Generating Educational Value through Desktop Efficiencies" is seemingly provided to support the study addressing the value of Microsoft software compared to open-source software in Europe, but it all it really illuminates is the cost savings of migrating from Windows 98 with Microsoft's Group Policy Editor to Windows XP with Active Directory deployed. That doesn't really tell us very much about the advantages of Microsoft's solution relative to open-source solutions. I read a couple of the case studies from other countries, and they all seem to address the benefits of specific Microsoft technologies without addressing open source at all.
Office liked more than OO.org
The study also claims that students consistently prefer Microsoft Office rather than OpenOffice.org. "In schools where both Microsoft Office and Open Office are available, student and teacher satisfaction with Microsoft is consistently higher," says the study. "For desktop productivity, 48–50 per cent of schools reported that student satisfaction with Microsoft products is higher than with OSS, but only 17–26 per cent reported the same for the open source platform."
On the surface, that claim is not surprising. In terms of raw performance and functionality, Microsoft Office is arguably superior to OpenOffice.org, and Office has a strong and mostly positive reputation among users in professional environments. That still does not change the fact that, in most cases, users only use a fraction of the available features in Office. An open-source advocate would argue that the real question is whether or not the additional functionality of Microsoft Office justifies the licensing costs.
What do students and teachers like? "Task panes were praised for cutting down on time spent hunting through different menus and easing the complexity of student tasks such as document style and formatting activities... The Microsoft Word 'track changes' feature was cited as a key tool that enabled group project collaboration among secondary students... Also, the 'insert comments' feature was cited for improving both student to teacher at an Italian middle school and student to student collaboration."
All are strong features, but all of them are also currently available in some form in OpenOffice.org 2.2, which is included by default in the latest Ubuntu release. OpenOffice.org isn't great software, but for most users, it will get the job done just as well at a significantly lower cost. Nevertheless, the study's claim that Office is preferred over OO.org even in situations where both applications are available shows that OO.org still has work to do if it ever hopes to make hamburger of Microsoft's cash cow.
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