Initial Announcement of OFSET

We can save money, promote freedom, and give schools better operating systems. I just wish my school would do something like this. It sounds like a good organization to become a part of.

The educational sector is beset on all sides, on one by the near-monopoly Apple at least had in this area, and on the other by a steady onslaught of crappy shareware (schools actually buy shareware, I've been on the provider end of that myself, long ago). So I'm extremely happy to see that someone is organizing to bail the poor suckers out through free software. It's interesting, because schools are the ones that might benefit the most from an open and free solution, but they're also some of the slowest adopters (except where there are Linux enthusiasts that admin the network or whatever). So, excellent work.

One thing, though. Please get someone who's a native English speaker or some semblance thereof to go through the text on the website. I don't think educators are going to be that turned on by the copy on the site as it stands.

Well, none of us are native english speakers. That said I have been kind of lazy about fixing the errors that I see.

There are other groups out there promoting Educational use of Open Source software and solutions. Check out the Seul/Edu section of Seul [Simple End User Linux]. I've been involved with this group, and they're fairly active -- they also know of and interact with other groups with similar goals. They might be a good source of information.

We know about SEUL/EDU but we think Seul/Edu policy concerning free software-software has serious problem as they may also promote proprietary software for GNU/Linux.
I suggest to anyonde to read their manifesto.
http://www.seul.org/what/manifesto.html

Hilaire Fernandes

I wasn't aware of their acceptance of non-free software. Well, since you're aware of them, at least you can draw off of their list of already free projects...and off of the groups they link to. Could collaboration still be a possibility? Pooling of resources?

There is also a project called Open Classroom

Perhaps this article may be a good place to list all such projects, and see how they are simallar, and what differences that they have. Promotion of Open and/or Free software in education is in general a good thing, and folks who have learned about computing with open or free software are unlikely to settle for anything less.

(I am of the opinion that we OS/Free geeks as a group should not split our efforts to this goal, just becasue some software in more or less free(libre) than other software. The benefits for education of having freely distributable/modifiable source code are great, and the aditional advantages of code that cannot become non-free should become clear to users who have been exposed to both types.)