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Firstly, thanks everyone for their feedback and opinions on the "Linux/FOSS in schools" topic. Some of the issues can be very open-ended, and it's good to see people with enough real-world experience and technical knowledge to be able to form realistic ideas about how to take this matter forward. I've read the BECTA report on OSS in schools, and also the excellent case studies of schools already implementing OSS solutions, but interestingly these focus largely on what we already know. For example, cost and feature comparisons of Windows & Linux, and of MS Office & Star/OpenOffice.org, GIMP/Photoshop, Apache/IIS etc. Getting back to my original concern, nowhere in these reports (that I've seen so far) is there any discussion of how to meet specific requirements for individual subject areas (software for history, geography, maths etc), although I agree with both opinions raised here that (a) once enough schools adopt the Linux platform the software will follow, and (b) if this software was provided over a web platform then this wouldn't even be an issue. Believe it or not, a substantial amount of the specialist software we currently use is actually written (or originally created) by current/past subject teachers, but it's mostly all closed source commercial software. Surely these of all people would understand the benefits of freely distributing software under a GNU-type public license. Jeremy -- Jeremy Pearson ICT Technician Five Islands School, St Marys, Isles of Scilly, TR21 0JY Tel: 01720 422929 Fax: 01720 422969 Web: fisonline.org.uk jeremypearson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe. FAQ: www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html