As quoted from SEUL, issue 46...
Edward Moriarity recently told us about Linux use at his school district:
Linux has been a great operating system for the Glendale Union High School
District (Glendale, Az.). We run our "home grown", business basic, student
accounting system (Grades, Attendance, Transcripts, Discipline, Personal
Information, etc.) at each of our 9 high schools. Each school has a server
with RedHat 6.0 and a basic emulator sold to us by BASIS Int. We manage
the systems and distribute updates via our WAN. This configuration is
completely scalable and affordable for any size school.
Some of you will recognize BASIS as the maker of Business BASIC, a version
of the BASIC language that was used by many small shops to write custom
applications to run on MS-DOS systems. We talked a bit about Glendale
Union open-sourcing their software, which they may be interested in doing,
but the Business BASIC initially seemed as though it might be an
impediment. It might be possible to look through the code and reimplement
it in another language, but that might be fairly labor-intensive. Luckily,
a search turned up three different implementations of Business BASIC for
Linux: Production BASIC, ProvideX, and BBj. The first one is GPLed, the
second we're not sure about, and the third is commercial. These packages
have the potential to open up a mass of niche applications to Linux; it's
worth your while to take a look at them.
The full address for SEUL is
http://www.seul.org
--
Jim
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