Could Free-Reading offer a glimpse of the future, when big, bulky -- and expensive -- textbooks go the way of the film strip? Adam Newman of Eduventures, an education research and consulting firm in Boston, thinks so. "This is a shot across the bow for a lot of people," he says.

GeoGebra, a GPL-licensed teaching and learning tool that integrates geometry, algebra, and calculus, benefits both teachers and students alike. Developed by Markus Hohenwarter at Florida Atlantic University, GeoGebra constructs geometrical figures and demonstrates the relationship between geometry and algebra.

Maybe not for the average corporation yet, or even the average home user, but every time Canonical releases a new version of Ubuntu (and with it comes Edubuntu), Microsoft becomes a little less the default vendor of choice for educational computing.

The Northern Territory Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET) today began the rollout of Macquarie University's Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) software to all NT public schools. LAMS is freely available as open source software from Macquarie's non-profit LAMS Foundation.

"Jean-Paul Huchon, president of the Région Ile de France (the greater Paris local government) has announced yesterday that his administration has started distributing 220 000 USB keys with Free and Open-Source software on it, including Firefox. The recipients are mostly students (173 000 of them) and teachers (40 000)..."

The Canary Islands have two derivatives of Kubuntu, one which is being installed in all their schools and one used by the largest university. The Jornadas de Software Libre conference at The University of La Laguna, took place in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, from the 18th-21st September 2007. It was organised by the university’s Software Libre Office (OSL).

The reason that the Russian announcement is funny boils down to the perception over the years that Russia equates to totalitarianism, whilst here in America we're all about Freedom and innovation.