Linux Solutions

After a ten month campaign by volunteers to encourage open source in schools, the Polish Ministry of National Education has recommended that schools and universities switch to open source software.

In a statement, the Ministry recommended that schools and universities use OpenOffice. They say believe that the application is sufficiently mature and advanced enough 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.”

The ministry published the statement on its website just before the end of the ‘WiOO w Szkole’ (’Free and Open Software in Schools’) campaign. The promotional tour was run by 150 volunteers of the Polish Foundation on Open Source (Fwioo).

Over the course of ten months, the volunteers visited 99 schools, mostly junior and high scools, speaking to 4,506 students an 43 villages and cities.

“During these meetings, our volunteers presented Open Source applications, answered questions and cleared up doubts. They often also helped in installing the software on the PCs in school computer labs and on school servers”, says Fwioo member Łukasz Nowicki, who began setting up the campaign at the end of the summer in 2007 in Poznan, where Fwioo was founded.

Where possible, the Wioo w Szkole campaign volunteers used local Open Source enthusiasts to assist in the promotion.

In the city of Bielsko Biała for example, all schools participated in the campaign. “We combined our visit to the city with the Free Software day, which attracted local Open Source developers and we even managed to interest university teachers and several local police officers.”

So far 30 percent of the schools visited by the volunteers have switched - at least partly - to Open Source. Most of these schools have now configured their PCs to run a GNU/Linux distribution such as Ubuntu, Suse or Mandriva, alongside Windows.

“Some school staff told us they are still considering a switch, others would use the summer vacation to for instance install OpenOffice and a few schools said they would switch to Open Source when they renew their computer labs,” said Nowicki.

A good example of a school using Open Source is, according to Nowicki, High School No 15 in the city of Wrocław. “At this school teachers show students how to use Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X. This broad knowledge base lets students develop their interests without limiting them to a specific platform.”