The Kamloops/Thompson School District in British Columbia, Canada, is a free software success story. Gregg Ferrie, manager of information technology for the district, believes its infrastructure may be the largest Linux on-the-desktop implementation in Western Canada in public education.

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.

"For some reason, Linux and education seem to go hand-in-hand. Some of the benefits of Linux make the association between the two very natural.[...]There is, however, the ever-present argument that the real world uses Microsoft products, therefore Microsoft products are what children should be taught in school."

"The sections below develop reasons for adoption of free software exclusively for school education. Towards the end, a list of policy guidelines and recommendations are provided for discussion. The document does not cover the pros and cons of using ICT for education. I will try to intervene during the deliberations on these issues. Why Free Software for education? ..."

All over the world millions of kids are studying computers and technology. Imagine what a difference we could make if we could figure out how to help the open source community embrace that opportunity. What if we could help kids explore how computer systems in the real world work in a friction-less playground that allows them to crack open the box, explore its insides and tinker.

Familiarity undoubtedly ranks among the largest barriers to open source adoption — software, like so many other things, is habit-forming. Much of that familiarity, at least among younger users, comes from the prevalence of proprietary applications in education, an area awash with government regulations, competitive bidding, and its own habit-induced hangups.

"Last week, after months of work, EFF launched Teaching Copyright, a balanced, fact-based curriculum for high school educators looking to discuss copyright issues in the classroom.

There’s nothing worse than hearing how an entire school district is switching operating systems from Mac to Windows (or vice versa) because that’s what the “business” world relies on or some other blather. The costs associated with the transition are enormous and the whole ‘to do’ is unnecessary, because features on applications mimic one another.

Open Education encompasses a wide range of ideas and practices: open educational resources, open learning support, open credentialing, open access, open scholarship, open teaching, and others. Sometimes open education is enacted by a national government or as an institutional initiative, other times an open education practitioner can feel like a lone voice crying in the wilderness.