"...The following text has been crossposted from Stephen Downes: The Future of Education, liveblogged notes taken at the conference by Stephen Downes at the First International Conference Free Knowledge, Free Technology - Education for a free information society [...] The conference deals first with the concept of public goods and public education, and their relationship with Freedom.

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".

The Director of Public Instruction (DPI) has issued orders making free software compulsory. It says Linux Operating System should be used for IT education in eighth, ninth and tenth standards.

"September 15 is Software Freedom Day, a celebration of free and open source software “to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere!”

«'Public Software'? The so-called Public Software is a political project which aims to remove the Free Software main feature: the Freedom. It tries to put the people in the role of mere 'viewing public'.

When you say that something is expensive, you have to say also, compared with what? This comparison cannot only be on price. You have to compare value received. What is the value of an education, then? In crass financial terms, you can set a price on education based on the Net Present Value of expected earnings over a lifetime.

Considering all of the above, I ask IDC to recall the study “Total cost of ownership of IT infrastructure in Russian schools” as being inconsistent with the facts of the reality and able to mislead the public education system officials and the general public.

"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.

One of the goals of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) is to become a center for education in free and open source software (FOSS) legal issues.