A few days ago the news broke that in Denmark the decision was made to ban Chromebooks and the Google Workspace suite of productivity software and tools in schools due to data transfer risks.
Table revives the debate on the possibilities offered by the Linux ecosystem and the use of open source applications in general to meet the needs of schools, administrations and other public services.
In a verdict published last week, the Danish data protection agency, Datatilsynet, revealed that the processing of student data using the Workspace software suite (which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar and Google Drive) does not meet the requirements. of the European Union Data Protection Regulation (RGPD).
Specifically, the authority found that Google's data processing agreement, or terms and conditions, apparently allow the transfer of data to other countries for the purpose of providing support, even if the data is generally stored in one of Google's data centers. European data from Google.
Chromebooks, and by extension Google Workspace, are used in schools all over Denmark. But hehe danish data protection agency focused specifically on the Helsingor case for risk assessment after the municipality reported a personal data security breach in 2020. Although this latest ruling does not technically apply to Helsingor schools for now, Datatilsynet notes that many of the conclusions it reached are likely to apply to other municipalities using Google Chromebooks and Workspace. Datatilsynet added that it hoped these other municipalities would take the necessary steps following the decision in Helsingor. L'
The table revives the debate on the possibilities offered Linux and open source for the needs of educational centers, administrations and other public services. For example, the authorities of the city of Grenoble presented in 2015 their project to replace the operating systems of the devices of the city's schools with the Linux operating system.
A few months later, and more precisely in December 2015, the city of Grenoble once again announced its membership of the April association, whose mission is to defend and promote free software. Through this announcement, we glimpse a strengthening of the city's actions in favor of free software, but also a desire to count on the experience of its strong free software community.
Also, to implement this project, a pilot installation was carried out in one school in the spring of 2015 and extended to other schools in the period from October to December 2015. Given the success of this project pilot, the 16th great city of France switched another eight schools entirely to Linux, according to the schedule, the deadline was set for 2018 to fully migrate the public school systems of this city to Linux.
Initially Ubuntu Linux was chosen for desktops and laptops and Debian for servers. According to the impressions noted by the latter, this transition to Linux seems to have been easily accepted by students and teachers alike.
Only the observation with Linux is that the open source operating system is struggling to establish itself in the desktop arena. As a result, initiatives like the one in the city of Grenoble are rare, strictly speaking, Linux is its kernel, that is, the part of the operating system that manages the computer's resources and serves as a communication bridge between the various components (hardware and software); it is the invisible part of the operating system.
“I want us [the community] to push harder in the direction of moving towards a standardized desktop offering, which will run on all OS variants. I am personally very upset at the extent to which this degree of fragmentation has held back Linux on the desktop,” he said of this.
In 2013, Miguel Icaza –one of the pioneers of the Linux ecosystem with his work on the GNOME desktop– used a similar argument to justify abandoning Linux in favor of Mac. “For me, the fragmentation of Linux as a platform, the multiplicity of Incompatible distributions and incompatibilities between versions of the same distribution make Linux comparable to the Chernobyl disaster on the desktop,” he said.
Source: https://www.datatilsynet.dk/