Linux help in Hawaii

While I do take my hat off to the Bill and Melinda foundation for their charitable works here in my own county and state, I am also thrilled to see Linux being used to make a difference as well. The Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation is working hard to show that Linux has many options in the free educational program arena.

The most thrilling part of originations like the Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation is the community of it all. Starting out with little more than a pile of broken down PCs, they have built up to something truly wonderful.

hether Linux is suitable for the desktop yet is a point debated by analysts, journalists, hobbyists, and pundits worldwide. It’s easy to find stories about enterprise adoption of Linux for servers, and corporate CIOs are ever so willing to extol the virtues of open source software — as long as it is kept in the back. No one ever goes all the way and puts Linux on the secretaries’ computers (OK, maybe it happened once). Perhaps the way to see Linux adopted globally in the enterprise is to start developing desktop users at a tender age. That’s what Scott Belford and the other members of the Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation (HOSEF) are counting on.

As Belford likes to say, HOSEF was founded “by a pile of discarded computers.” He was working on an MBA at the University of Hawaii when he stumbled upon a bunch of old hardware on the trash heap. A closer look made Belford realize that these computers were just like the ones he used to run back in the early ’90s, with Linux. Why couldn’t those systems, perfectly usable when not running bloated proprietary operating systems with high RAM and disk space requirements, be reclaimed and put to use to help school kids and teachers do their work, cheaper and more efficiently?