Feb 20th 2008 Linux will dominate UK schools within 5 years
Eighteen months ago it would be unthinkable to make the prediction that by 2013 Linux would supplant Windows as the operating system of choice for most school children. We're now beginning to think the unthinkable.
http://www.siriusit.co.uk/myblog/linux-will-dominate-uk-schools-within-5-years.html

Stephen Fry
The Guardian, Saturday February 2 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/02/opensource.stephenfry

Windows Vista, Office 2007 Expelled From British Schools
The agency said U.K. schools can consider using Vista or Office 2007 software only when they are buying new batches of PCs. Even then, however, they're advised to take a long looked at alternatives based on Linux and other open source products, such as the OpenOffice.org desktop package.
The agency that governs educational technology in the United Kingdom has advised schools in the country to keep Microsoft Windows Vista operating system and its Office 2007 software out of the classroom and administrative offices.
http://www.informationweek.com

France's gendarmerie switches to Linux
Now, there are plans to migrate 70,000 workstations in the country's largest administrative complex to Linux
http://www.heise.de/english/

The Dutch government has recently attracted Microsoft's anger by launching an actionplan to adopt open standards, and concretely OpenDocument Format by April 2008 in the national government. Open Standards will become mandatory and Free Software will be preferred. As the Minister of State, Frank Heemskerk, argued, this plan is not to exclude any company, but to stimulate information exchange, vendor independence and choice for various software products that implement open standards.

The Norwegian government has mandated the use of open document formats from January 1st, 2009.
There are three formats that have been mandated for all documentation between authorities and users/partners, namely:
* HTML for all public information on the Web.
* PDF for all documents where layout needs to be preserved.
* ODF for all documents that the recipient is supposed to be able to edit
Goverment, state and regional agencies, authorities and services may also publish in other formats, but they must always publish in one of these formats. The decree is retroactive, and by 2014 all documents published prior to this decree must have been converted and made available in one of the three formats.

Why should open source software be used in schools?
It is indeed a strange world when educators need to be convinced that sharing information, as opposed to concealing information, is a good thing. The advances in all of the arts and sciences, indeed the sum total of human knowledge, is the result of the open sharing of ideas, theories, studies and research. Yet throughout many school systems, the software in use on computers is closed and locked, making educators partners in the censorship of the foundational information of this new age. This software not only seeks to obscure how it works, but it also entraps the users' data within closed, proprietary formats which change on the whim of the vendor and which are protected by the bludgeon of the End User License Agreement. This entrapment of data is a strong, punitive incentive to purchase the latest version of the software, regardless of whether it suits the educational purposes better, thereby siphoning more of the school's limited resources away from the school's primary purpose. The use of such closed software in education may be justified only where no suitable open source solution exists.
http://edge-op.org/grouch/schools.html

I'm an art professor, and last semester I embarked on an exciting new adventure by erasing Mac OS X from nearly all of the Macintoshes in our digital media lab and installing Ubuntu in its place.
The students' reactions to all this was inspiring. They felt empowered by the quality of the software and their ability to upgrade, share, and customize it freely. They also appreciated the immense array of additional GNU/Linux multimedia software available to them. And I found it inspiring how many of the students took enthusiastic advantage of other applications, not only by installing software via Synaptic from the Ubuntu repositories of more than 16,000 packages, but in some case by compiling source code from elsewhere.
http://www.linux.com/articles/52758