But only when they see that it makes sense and it will not require too much technical work to allow some! Ahhrg by the way! First post!

I believe this is the risk of being pioneers on something, they inventing this tv streaming service and the dvd rental... Then suddendly the market you invent changes, and as you are the pioner you do not have examples to follow on your way to avoid sotck price to drop in your segment as well as a complete study on how your consumers will behave before the options you give.

I believe that Microsoft is now interesent somehow in Linux success. Mainly because many virtualization options may run on Linux servers but having as Guests MS Servers. Also take a look at this article some days ago: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/07/16/2316251/Microsoft-Developer-Made-the-Most-Changes-To-Linux-30-Code

http://jcp.org/en/jsr/results?id=5207 There you will find the comments... It is good to see that it is not google the one that would like the license of java changed, but IBM and SouJava as well.

In my honest opinion everything in Computers world has a lifecycle, and in this case, Java Oracle is providing this lean featured Java releases because they are running out of ideas to implement for the JCP. Java soon will have to enter in the Maintenance only and not give new features, so it means it may soon disapear from Enterprises and Education levels (maybe like in 3 years).

Probably then they are switching to Unity due to the schedule?

Actually, have you tried playing out with Google App engine? It brings to the table a host server for your Django application at very low cost. It also allows you to integrate your application with google user managment. Why to use? Well, for me, it is for low cost hosting for Django Applications, but for business it can be really interesting as there is somebody taking care of the infrastructure while they only need to care about the application itself.

Have you thought on Gobby? It is easily downloaded from Ubuntu. It has sintax highlight for some languages and it is very easy to set up. The SVN Server is also a good idea, but the students should learn to configure the server. As you would like them to have on a centrilized way SVN would be the best. I would not go to git because they are "distributed" by nature, so they would do again everybody one part and not "togther". I hope this helps.

Leave the crappy games from EA & play Blizzard Games! Go for WOW!