The open source community is up in arms today following Becta’s decision to award its open source schools project to a little-known consultancy firm.

Becta, the UK government agency responsible for technology in the education sector has promised to do more to promote the use of open source software within schools and colleges and has warned educational institutions in the UK against upgrading to Windows Vista and Microsoft Office.

I stated yesterday that open source had not been widely adopted in the UK without really backing the statement up. Fortunately SiriusIT, the UK-based open source services firm, has revamped its site with a blog entry explaining the situation with the example of open source adoption in the schools sector.

It's good to see news about continuing adoption of open source software in schools around the world. I've written before about how doable it would be for many American schools to reduce costs, increase efficiency and arm kids with Linux notebooks through open source adoption.

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.

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".

"I'm a computer science major who has been recently getting involved in local grassroots politics in my county and state. I've been discussing the idea with some of my state legislatures of submitting a couple of resolutions, opening up to the idea of switching to open source software in our state's K-12 schools.

More than a hundred schools across Finland are using open source for all of their desktop PCs, according to Opinsys, an open source services provider.

THE OPEN SOURCE community was bitterly disappointed today after the UK appointed an unknown consultancy to run an historic programme of advocacy in schools.