When a Linux rollout cuts costs, proprietary IT management software is the next budget item on the chopping block.

To be honest, for a couple of years now I have been pretty skeptical about the future of Free and Open Source software in Finnish schools and education sector in general. In Finland we have a lot of open source expertise and know-how. We have developers. I also assume that majority of the (liberally) higher educated people in Finland, at least know what is "Open Source" and "Linux".

Alexander Ponosov, director of the school in the village of Sepych, Perm Territory, who has found guilty of installing pirated Windows software in 12 school computers, has changed jobs. He is now engaged in popularizing the free Linux operating system, Window's biggest competitor, after winning a competition held by the Russian Federal Education Agency (Rosobrazovanie) to test Linux in school computers in three regions of the country. Ponosov received wide attention after the local prosecutor charged him with installing pirated software in school computers.

Today sees the launch of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration which aims to make learning and teaching materials freely available online, to improve the quality of education in schools in South Africa and the rest of the world, leveraging the potential for open collaboration on the Web.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, the long-awaited title by id Software and Splash Damage, launched today in North America. While a Linux-native client of this game isn't available today, it will be available shortly.

Australian schools are subscribing to proprietary software - but the choice between proprietary and open source may have not been made on entirely equal ground, according to Kathryn Moyle, an Associate Professor who researches issues arising from integrating information and communication technologies into school education at the University of Canberra.

A wonderful thing happened today at QuakeCon. John Carmack announced the release of GPL source code for the Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Return to Castle Wolfenstein engines!

One person's trash is another's treasure, and this weekend open source vendors and community members plan to join forces with a Northern Californian recycling organization to transform hundreds of desktop and laptops into PCs loaded with Ubuntu, Firefox, OpenOffice and more to be donated to needy area schools.

I seriously don’t understand why schools don’t do this. If your school needs a PC lab, buy a whole bunch of Pentium 3 computers (or even Pentium 2) and run Ubuntu. It comes with almost everything a school computer needs. Kids in public school won’t know how to modify the system in any way and its completely safe to use.