Ric Murry recently shared a snapshot of the kinds of conversations happening around solving budget problems. What he didn’t realize is that he missed the conversation happening behind the scenes…and I’ve tried to capture it below (right click to view at full size):

Right click to view at full size.

Here’s how Ric continued that conversation….

In the meantime, these stats from SolidOffice’s Benjamin Horst say something all by themselves…why aren’t K-12 education leaders listening?

• “From the official announcement on Monday 13th October at 09:00 UTC, to midnight on Sunday 20th October, OpenOffice.org 3.0 recorded an astonishing three million downloads via the Bouncer. That’s:
  221,230 GNU/Linux users
  320,622 Mac OS X users, and
  2,449,863 Microsoft Windows users.

• From Birmingham to Brussels, local and regional governments are switching to OpenOffice in a bid to confront the hegemony of Microsoft. “The idea of using open source software not originated by an American multinational corporation seems to go down particularly well in the French public service,” says John McCreesh, marketing project lead of OpenOffice.org.
• The French Gendarmerie’s gradual migration to a complete open source desktop and web applications has saved millions of euro, says Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard. “This year the IT budget will be reduced by 70 percent. This will not affect our IT systems.”

• With about 30% of netbooks shipping with Linux, and users of even the Windows netbooks unlikely to purchase Microsoft Office (it would cost more than half again the cost of the entire machine), the company is in a difficult situation that is only going to get tougher.

  But on the other hand, consumers are benefitting from low cost machines that fill their needs quite well, and that is cause to celebrate.

• Over the past decade open source software has become popular with technology users in India. The benefits of open source – affordability, availability of source code and freedom of choice – have made open source a preferred platform for many innovative Indian organizations and individuals…

And much, much more! Kudos to Benjamin for keeping such a solid focus on free software and OpenOffice. Read the full articles online at http://www.solidoffice.com/

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure