Enterprise open source Toolkit

Open source in education: Winning hearts and minds

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Linux

Published: 07 Mar 2006 15:00 GMT

...leader of an open source research project at Dutch research institute MERIT, agrees with Osborne that open source desktops have lower support requirements.

As part of Ghosh's research project he studied the implementation of open source by schools in Extremadura and says that schools in the area only have one or two support staff for every thousand students. This has been made possible by the fact that the same version of the free software can be installed across thousands of desktops, even though some schools are using old PCs.

"Schools dealing with old hardware can't use the latest proprietary software, but you can use free software on any hardware configuration and get a similar interface," he says.

Overcoming barriers

The importance of the education sector for the wider adoption of open source, in both the public and private sector, is clear. Yet there are many barriers that open source vendors need to overcome to get a foothold in this market.

One of the main barriers — Becta's implicit support of proprietary software — appears to be crumbling away with successive reports. But open source vendors need to work with Becta to make sure that its policy and documentation regarding open source is consistent, so that schools get the message loud and clear.

Open source vendors would also do well to take a long-term view of the education market; even though the schools may not as lucrative as other parts of the public sector, the trickle down effect from education into the wider consumer and even business arenas is surely an opportunity they cannot afford to miss.

Read on for a detailed look at Orwell High School's Linux migration.