Last school year, I worked as a technology coordinator for a rural high school in Illinois. In an attempt to save the school some money, I introduced OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Firefox, and Thunderbird. Linux was also installed on a few desktop PCs and a couple of servers. Ubuntu was the Linux distribution selected.

Around 560,000 German students plus thousands of staff at 33 German universities will now be supported by Linux systems from Novell.

Midland Valley High School, in Aiken, SC, received a grant allowing it to deploy Moodle and offer students laptops.

Kiddix Computing has come up with a Linux-based operating system designed especially for children aged 5-10. All of the icons for applications are situated around the edge of the desktop. There's e-mail, a browser, an office suite, a paint program and some games (both educational and just plain fun). All are built with open-source code, and everything has a user interface designed for kids.

A switch to free open source software can minimize cost and allow funding to be diverted to equipment and other programs. For instance, the OpenOffice suite is an alternative to expensive basic application programs offered by major vendors. Many such programs on the market offer features seldom used in education but for which educators must pay.

The fact is that, in a production environment, Linux is NOT a free solution. There are costs associated with every solution and the relative cost of any solution is dependent upon many factors. In the end, no solution will serve all needs, nor will any solution, by itself, prove to be dramatically more cost-effective than another.

I have a real open source crisis at my hands. My ’school’ IT department has been pushing for the implementation of Microsoft Office 2007 in our 60 machines. The funny thing is, since our IT head is also our supplier, he too is pushing for this because he probably gets a commission. I’m the only one who has offered an alternative, Open Office, naturally.

"I believe it's important to emphasize to all education technology people (or anyone else, for that matter) that they should not view open source simply as a cheap replacement for something else."