OSICT

Two UK schools have demonstrated savings of over 90,000 GBP per year when they migrated their classroom computer systems over to open source in 2004/5.

The Orwell High School and Sir Frederic Osborn School switched from a mixed Windows PC environment over to Linux based thin-clients using Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) software.

After an initial familiarisation period both schools were reported to have been highly satisfied with the performance of the new systems:

On "Children's day" in India (November 14th) a new open source operating system called EduBOSS will be officially launched - reports The Hindu. The aim of EduBOSS is to make children in Indian schools aware of open source software so they are prepared to use it in their working lives.

CampusTechnology.com reports that the department of Education and Training (DET) in Western Australia has moved to an Open Source data management system based on the Ingres database.

The new data system runs on Red Hat Linux and 11 Ingres databases. The hardware is described as "commodity".

Previously the department had been using a proprietary database system to handle the data requirements of 11 colleges, 8000 staff and 120,000 students.

Reasons given for moving away from proprietary hardware and software to Open Source include:

• more "customer focussed" systems