The school board I worked for, from what I heard from the Manager of Information Technology, have added Firefox and OpenOffice.org to their default list of programs on their Windows images, although Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office are still the default.

That's a step in the right direction at least but before you blast this school board for relying on Microsoft technologies, I want to state that last summer they implemented a system using N-Computing devices that allow one computer to turn into four terminals (saving money through lower energy costs and Windows licenses) and experimented with creating Ubuntu images pre-installed with Edubuntu-type programs, like GCompris.

Unfortunately, large organizations such as this school board need to worry about long-term support and N-Computing only supported Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake and beta-supported Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn, both of which were soon to be unsupported by Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu. Ultimately the technicians couldn't get N-Computing to work fully with Ubuntu and abandoned the Ubuntu images but kept the N-Computing devices. That's too bad, but at least they experimented with it and maybe will give it another shot in a few years time.

I was in contact with Canonical at the time to discuss the support issues of how N-Computing only supported their older releases and asked them to call the Manager of Information Technology, but nothing came of it.

Interesting dilemma though, where Canonical supports their every fourth release (such as Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake) for 3 years on the desktop and yet it still seems too fast for corporations such as N-Computing to keep up with.

My current university, Trent, will at least be installing a Xubuntu thin-client solution (dual-booted with Windows XP) for the Mathematics and Computer Science departments. This is in large part thanks to Ryan Oram of Infinity OS fame.

As noted by Bob Sutor, an IBM employee, Mozilla Firefox will now be the default browser for the entire staff at IBM. He stated that a few thousand employees used Firefox by choice on their Linux, Mac and Windows machines, but the browser will now be installed by default on all their laptop and desktop images, extending to their ~400,000 employees.

Sutor has even stated,

Any employee who is not now using Firefox will be strongly encouraged to use it as their default browser. All new computers will be provisioned with it. We will continue to strongly encourage our vendors who have browser-based software to fully support Firefox.

This is significant because, working as a computer technician for a local school board in the past, we had to run software such as IBM/Tivoli Remote Deployment Manager and IBM/TLC School Connect to provision Windows images to broken thin-clients and manage their Active Directory set up, respectively. When I used my Ubuntu laptop to connect, Firefox would struggle to display a couple pages and I would be forced to use a working thin-client just to connect.

Did it make sense that School Connect only worked with Internet Explorer? Well, maybe, since it connects to a Windows-only Active Directory server, but that's really restricting your audience, like DRM for web browsers (you buy an MP3 on an iPod and you can only play that MP3 on an iPod, not any other music player or device). Was this Firefox's fault? No. I looked at the source code (don't forget, I'm a web developer) and noticed the software's dependence on archaic Microsoft technologies and closed standards. IBM pushing Firefox internally will only force this software monolith to program web-based software with open standards, which will allow fair competition between web browsers and not lock any user out from using their software (including us dolorous computer technicians). I am hoping this will also push my local school board and former employer into not only adding Firefox to their Windows images, but making Firefox their default browser for thousands of students and staff in due time. I have noted to the Manager of Information Technology, my former boss, that Google has dropped their support for Internet Explorer 6, so at least they'll be getting rid of that non-open-standard-complying piece of &%$! technology.

I find this not only a win for Firefox, but a win for open standards in web development, allowing us web developers to breathe a little easier while programming and designing web sites, knowing that all our features are supported once it is released into the wild.