The open source community will receive a major boost this week from the UK government's ICT agency, which has investigated the potential benefits of using free and non-proprietary software in education.
The research, carried out by the British Educational Communications and Technology Association (BECTA), concluded that primary schools could cut computer costs by nearly half if they stopped buying, operating and supporting products from software vendors such as Microsoft, according to the Times Educational Supplement.
Becta's report won't be officially released until 13 May, but its initial findings were presented to a workshop last month. The panel of educational IT specialists heard that open source software offered lower support, hardware and software costs, and also discussed perceived barriers to open source take-up.
At present, Microsoft has an agreement with the Department of Education and Skills under which schools can receive sponsorship of up to AU$37,500. This has sparked claims that schools are cancelling open source projects to avoid upsetting Microsoft.
ZDNet UK's Graeme Wearden reported from London. Ingrid Marson contributed to this report. For more coverage from ZDNet UK, click here.
This is an interesting article. I work in a primary school in the North of England and I am the network administrator and school's ICT technician. We are very lucky to receive an healthy budget towards the growth of ICT. Currently we have a Windows 2003 Server with more than 30 PCs running Windows XP Professional and many laptops dotted round the premises which are all wireless. Recently I've deployed Mandriva (formally Mandrake) Linux on one of the networked PC's and it was doing the job of it's XP counterparts within the same afternoon AND it already had OpenOffice and a wide range of other open source software included in the installation. I could deploy linux tomorrow and have it all up and working within a week. Imagine how much money this could save the school in software licences? The only problem is I'm soon to be leaving and as far as future-proofing goes, there are very few people I know that are confident running a conventional Windows network, let alone one which uses linux.