Today I was in a public school near where I live for a interview with Nazareth, the coordinator of a social-inclusion project for the less afortunate kids in brazil, that live in 2 poor-communities: Alto do Coqueirinho and Bairro da paz.

"Richard Stallman is the father of Free Software. I am republishing one of his essay here on why schools should exclusively use Free software..."

DFEY-NW (Digital Freedom in Education and Youth) is a group formed in response from a growing need in the Northwest of England for a group to encourage and promote young people's involvement with the free software community by creating a social space to make it more comfortable for young people to get involved with GLUGs and FSUGs.

Richard Stallman addressed the students and staff on "Free Software and Education" on 16-12-2008 at the campus of Christ University, Bangalore.

I have been thinking for a while about how to get more exposure for Free and Open Source Software. I work in a school district which, like most, is owned by Microsoft. I have tried for several years to get more FOSS on the desktops and I have had only minimal success. Firefox is now installed on most if not all machines, and we have Audacity, GIMP and even Blender on some machines.

Just as the world's economies started to tank, Australia's Governments got themselves into an economic bind by promising to supply public school children with laptops. However, a leading systems integrator has issued a blueprint for an affordable blanket laptop roll out using Linux and netbooks.

I won't say Ken Starks is a friend of mine but I have met him. He's a good guy on dedicated mission to bring Linux to the people. He is neither pushy or invasive. He brings information to those whom wish to obtain it.

That said, I'm surprised his reply email was this calm...

Microsoft is set to be the biggest loser. Compared with wireless and hardware vendors, it is bound to lose a large chunk of revenue over the next few years as NSW moves to reduce software costs.