Red Hat Sees Education as Long-Term Investment

By Michael Hall
Managing Editor, Crossnodes

Networld + Interop, Las Vegas — Red Hat has
taken the first public step in a campaign it initiated last
December to bring its software into public schools across the
United States free of charge by announcing the K-12 Red Hat Linux
Education program, a move that won’t net the company any revenue,
but which it sees as a long-term investment nonetheless.

Late last year, when Microsoft announced it had reached a
settlement covering dozens of antitrust suits brought forth by
schools involving a $1.1 billion software giveaway, Red Hat fired
back with an offer to provide its own software to schools and a
demand that Microsoft spend its money on computing hardware for the
poorest school districts in the United States.

Pitching the company’s new program, Red Hat marketing VP Mark de
Visser called the $1 billion figure “totally bogus,” pegging the
sticker price for a single installation of Microsoft’s Windows
operating system and a copy of its Office product at $800, prices
typically not paid for wide-scale installations.

As he called Microsoft’s largesse into question, the executive
also pointed to recent stories involving the Redmond company’s
attempts at enforcement of its software licenses, which have
involved audits through the company’s somtime-proxy, the Business
Software Alliance, and assorted fines that have ranged into the
hundreds of thousands of dollars. Further agitating school
districts already concerned about possible non-compliance in their
often under-supported deployments, sis confusing language recently
discovered on Microsoft’s web site (subsequently altered) that
implies it is illegal to remove software originally shipped with a
given computer, something de Visser characterizes as “hardly an
innocent mistake” that “put a lot of people on alert.”

Under Red Hat’s program, seven county school systems in North
Carolina will be outfitted with Red Hat Linux for their networks,
as well as a dedicated support contact within the company, and
access to a special channel of the Red Hat Network, the company’s
fee-based support services, that provides a thin-client-style
installation for desktop machines. Red Hat will also provide some
training to technicians from each of the districts.

As far as the actual cost to Red Hat for running the program, de
Visser declined comment, noting only that a year’s subscription to
Red Hat Network services costs approximately $60 per year and that
Red Hat Linux, the company’s core product, “has a tendency of being
given away anyway.”

If all goes well with the seven-county pilot, de Visser said the
company hopes to expand to a statewide, then nationwide level.

Capturing a piece of the education market isn’t a new strategy
for technology companies. As early as the late 1970’s, Apple not
only agressively pushed its Apple II-series machines to educators
but tried to push national legislation through that would have
netted it a tax break for donating machines to schools. The
legislation was defeated, but the strategy has lived on in the form
of a wisdom has prevailed among many in the tech industry that
capturing the loyalty of students early on is a key to later sales
as those students graduate and move into decision-making positions.
That strategy is reflected in numerous free or dramatically
reduced-price copies of everything from operating systems to Web
design software to computers themselves on college campuses.

de Visser said a similar benefit will accrue to Red Hat if the
program goes well, in that students coming from schools
participating in the program will acquire “a good body of knowlege
about Linux moving into the workforce.”

A secondary benefit, according to de Visser, is the possibility
that a growing sense of momentum for Linux in schools will push for
development of software crucial to their operation. Besides
software typically associated with education, such as multi-media
language instruction or arithmetic and reading software dressed up
as games, schools are dependent on highly specialized software that
does everything from tracking daily attendance to arranging class
schedules at the beginning of each year. Much of that software,
which can run upwards of $10,000 up front with support costs in the
thousands per year, has yet to appear for Linux. de Visser said Red
Hat has begun the process of identifying vendors of such management
software to approach as momentum builds.