Open Source for Education?

"Looking around the British Education Training and Technology show, BETT 2009, it was clear by the sheer size of the event, that an awful lot of money is being spent on technology in education.

With Open Source Software (OSS) freely available, covering almost every requirement in the national curriculum, a question has to be asked why schools do not back it more fully, possibly saving millions of pounds." - bbc.com (full article here)

A question raised by Andrew Miller (an independent British journalist) with regards to the kinds of savings that governments can make on public education if they would resort to free open source software instead of proprietary software they currently use. Other than open source software being free, its quality is increasingly becoming comparable if not better than that of proprietary software.

Other than the implications that such a suggested move would directly have on owners of proprietary software, what will it mean to the consumer of the future who would be exposed to open source software during their school experience, increasing the chances that they would resort to that option for their personal computers.

Open source is getting to be more and more under the spotlight and it seems that things are just starting to shake up, creating rapid intermediating change in the software industry, as Anita McGahan would label it.