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.

Even the unadventurous Israeli education system may soon discover that there is (computerized) life after Microsoft. The country's schools will forgo Word and Windows in favor of parallel programs from Sun Microsystems. For the first time, the education system's tenders committee has authorized cooperation in principle with Sun, in a move that could undermine Microsoft's sovereignty in Israeli classrooms.

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.

The Polish Ministry of National Education is advising schools and universities to use Open Source software. The recommendation comes at the end of a volunteer campaign to help schools switch to Open Source.

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.

Greek advocates of free and open source software are warning that the Greek government is going to waste millions of euro on proprietary software licenses for the country's schools. They are calling on the Ministry of Education to cancel its latest procurement.

Fermi is a high school that isn't afraid of experiments. This year, besides a project to build a mini-rocket to be launched in 2011 and setting up a photovoltaic lab, they're trying to solve with open licenses a problem that costs every italian students from 300 to 500 Euros each year, the cost of textbooks, and are inviting other schools to participate.

One of the things I love to hear about is success stories of Linux in education, especially in the K12 arena. Early adoption and exposure to Linux and Open Source has the very positive effect of opening the horizons of these students to the vast array of options available to them.

"...There is no compatibility between education and proprietary software, not at the ethical level. The source code and the methods of Free Software are part of human knowledge. The mission of every school is to disseminate human knowledge. Proprietary software is not part of human knowledge. It's secret, restricted knowledge, which schools are not allowed to disseminate.