By Richard Hillesley, writes (12 Jun 2008 at 03:13):
Inertia, fear of the unknown and agreements with vendors have lead to slow adoption of open source and free software in UK schools.
Back in 2005, Becta – the body that advises the UK government on IT policy in education – issued a report which concluded that free and open source software could reduce the cost of deploying, supporting and maintaining computer systems in primary schools by between 20 and 50 per cent.
Becta’s report was the conclusion of a study of 48 schools over a period of three years, which compared 33 schools running traditional proprietary systems, against 15 that were running open source solutions. Link here
Mark