The NSW Department of Education and Training (DET) may increase the penetration of Linux on its 165,000 desktop fleet because open source is "clearly an industry trend".
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In the fourth and final part of this interview, Tim Anderson, Information Services Director, claims that there are an increasing number of innovative open source solutions for the education sector and Linux on the desktop is being taken seriously.
"We have to consider [open source] very seriously because it is clearly an industry trend. We need to have genuine competition in the marketplace for desktops ... a lot of innovative educational solutions are coming out of the open source area.
"The possibility of running Linux-based desktop platforms is real for us," said Anderson.
Other parts of this interview can be found here:
Part 1: DET begins slow crawl to a new Vista
Part 2: DET mulls Vista savings, training
Part 3: Licence costs may delay DET Vista plans
Part 4: DET considers Linux on the desktop
Vista is a big disappointment for me personally. Very demanding on hardware and doesn't provide any real new features over Windows XP. And I more and more believe it is open source software that is the real future. They are developing very very fast and the freedom they give to (and ensure for) the users is also very important. Availability of the source code is also very important. Openness and freedom along with software diversity should play a much biger role in education. Currently our schools are way too much in the hands of Microsoft monopoly.