Linux Solutions

US computer Titans Microsoft have suffered a set back in the UK education sector after Becta, the government procurement quango, reformed its purchasing regime in an attempt to break the companies hold on education , and launched a program that will involve schools adopting open source software.

The Schools Open Source project, costing around £270,000, is being fought over by three open source software suppliers – the Open Source Consortium, The Learning Machine and Open Source Software Watch.

Each of the suppliers has submitted tenders to Becta this week. The company picked to move ahead with the program will spend two years building a community of schools which uses and develops its own open source alternatives to Microsoft software.

Becta has called on open source companies to join its £80 million framework list of certified suppliers of software to schools, contacts for which will be awarded in June. The previous list consisted entirely of Microsoft suppliers and drew Becta widespread criticism for taking the easy option and going with the monopolist rather than home-grown and cheaper alternatives.

None of the three companies involved were prepared to confirm their involvement, they did say that the competition was an indication that Microsoft’s stranglehold on the industry was waning in the UK’s public sector.

President of the Open Source Consortium Mark Taylor, said: “We’ve been telling Becta for a while that they need to help kick start open source in the schools market. They said that would be skewing the market, but we said, ‘it’s already skewed’. All we are asking for is an even chance.”

“The procurement list is biased against open source companies,” said Taylor, who is bidding for the work as head of the Sirius open source consultancy.

“We will have open source companies being official suppliers to education for the first time. Becta are at last taking practical steps to open up the market. ”

Ian Lynch, director of business development at The Learning Machine, said: “I think a lot of this stuff is indicative of the fact that Becta is changing. Five years ago, open source would have been a bigger risk.”

The Office of Government Commerce announced on Monday that competition for places on its Educational Software License Framework had opened. The invitation to tender it wrote jointly with Becta called for open source suppliers to take part for the first time.

“We are particularly seeking suppliers who can provide a comprehensive choice of software solutions including appropriate open source and free-to-use alternatives and advise users on best value licensing,” said the framework’s contract notice on the Official Journal of the European Union.