Truly great news!
And not before time!
Open Source makes historic UK breakthrough
Becta green lights open source software in schools, at last
Commercial software licenses have been between our children and their education for a long time now and these days it’s absolutely unnecessary. Refusing to help schools wean themselves off unnecessary, commercial software is unconscionable. There is no good reason why children (or educational staff, for that matter) need be forced to agree to potentially criminalizing licensing terms with irrelevant third parties before they may engage in such fundamental educational activity as essay writing.
It’s a great day for empowerment and software freedom. If schools, their staff and students begin participating in open source projects and building and contributing to open, social applications, they could make some very valuable contributions and develop some deep computing skills on the way (skills the usefulness and relevance of which will degrade gracefully over decades, and not be curtailed in a year or two’s time by the next round of gratuitous commercial upgrades).
Providers of commercial, commodity software have no doubt dreaded this day for they must suspect that children who spend their entire education using unrestricted, open source software are going to be far less likely, upon becoming wage earners, to want to purchase “permit-ware” with its attendant restrictions and costs.
I’ll be interested to see who the other 12 suppliers are tomorrow.
Update: And here they are:
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/09/23/open-source-uk-80m-competition
Tags: education, Free software, open source