Poland’s Ministry of Education Recommends Open Source
Metamorphosis, based in Macedonia, announces that Poland’s Ministry of Education recommends open source software for the country’s schools. As one of the more populous members of the EU with over 40 million people, this could have a big impact!
In addition to general support of open source, the Ministry also specifically recommended OpenOffice.org:
“The Ministry recommended in a statement that schools and universities use OpenOffice. The application suite is sufficiently mature and advanced to be used for teaching and for office use in education and science institutes. “OpenOffice can successfully substitute proprietary applications and will result in significant savings on licenses.”
This recommendation is the culmination of a 10-month project in which 99 schools and over 4,500 students were introduced to FOSS by volunteer members of the Free and Open Software in Schools campaign.
“About 30 percent of the schools visited by the Wioo w Szkole [Free and Open Software in Schools] campaign have switched at least partly to Open Source. Most of these schools configured their PCs to run a GNU/Linux distribution such as Ubuntu, Suse or Mandriva, alongside Windows.”
More information is available at the Open Source Observatory website.