Re: [Fsfe-uk] Another positive development

[Graham Seaman]

Ian Lynch wrote:

> New Secretary of State for Education for England and Wales gave a
> specific mention to Open Source software in her speech at the British
> Education Training Technology Show.
>
> "Becta aims to secure further cost savings for operating system and
> office productivity software through a competition launched in November.
> This competition is open to all suppliers, including suppliers of open
> source software. We believe that high quality and well supported open
> source solutions have a valuable role to play in education."
>  
There seems to be a distinct visibility problem for free software, 
though - of all the hundreds of exhibitors at BETT the only one I could 
find that was free-software related was schoollinux.com (they did have a 
pleasingly large crowd round their stand though :-). And the only 
reference to free software in the whole of the TES special edition for 
BETT was one mention of ooffice and the gimp - listed as 'free' software 
and described as 'not as good as the real thing but good enough' 
together with some microsoft 'free' software.

If school users want to follow up Ruth Kelly's suggestion is it actually 
easy for them to do?  Or is there a huge market/marketing opportunity 
for free software being missed?

Graham