France’s ministry for education has migrated 2,500 servers across its 30 local education authorities to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in line with the ministry's open-source investment strategy to avoid problems associated with vendor lock-in

The department at the French Ministry of Education that is handling purchasing of software and software licenses is increasing its Open Source offerings to some 1.5 million teachers and education workers in 250 institutes France.

The department at the French Ministry of Education that is handling purchasing of software and software licenses is increasing its Open Source offerings to some 1.5 million teachers and education workers in 250 institutes France.

In a press release from the Icelandic Ministry of Education the ministry explains it is working with the free software community to put free software into Icelandic schools. Two main reasons are given. Firstly, the Ministry’s agenda is to increase knowledge and competence among students in IT related subjects (using free software). Secondly, the ministry wants to cut costs.

We are reaching an exciting time for Open Source in UK education as government interest is increasing and many teachers, support and management staff are using Open Source to greater effect in schools, colleges and universities.

More teachers and institutions are now participating with organizations like SchoolForge, the Open Source Education Foundation, and Open Source Schools. These educators are beginning to see that the open source philosophy has the power to transform education in several key ways.

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".

MICROSOFT has suffered further set-backs in the UK education sector this week after Becta, the government procurement quango, reformed its purchasing regime to break the software giant's hold on education, and launched a programme to get schools to adopt open source software.

As schools analyze alternatives to hefty licensing fees, LUGs and Linux-in-education organizations are pointing out that Open Source solutions are better suited to the educational environment, and are only a fraction of the cost.