Re:Educational applications in the cloud (Score 1)

You made some points. But your second paragraph made me think what is school good for: To have NO knowledge about a central technique of nowadays more than the very basics as users? No technical skills in computers? Does it mean to close pupils out of that portion of knowlesge and give it to someone anonymous? I don't know how's it in Australia but in central Europe the average pupil has more knowledge than the average teacher and there's not only a games generation (XBox/PS2 you name it) out there in schools. The Linux solution? The solution where the knowledge is completely outside the school and the insiders are just users? I admit that there's a learning curve with Linux which is probably higher than that of MS (if p&p really works), on the other hand I don't think that the proposal of no knowledge except basics will satisfy the needs of a school as there is often enough a reason for example to reinstall Windows from the scratch and such kind of school would not make even that. Of course MS won't do that, too, except for cash. I expect from a school the development of skills, especially in such important areas. I expect to find in a school at least a few teachers or pupils which have at least some basic knowledge in, for example, how to set up a network. How to give users access. No in-depth details like filigrane program tuning via registry manipulation. Which doesn't mean that this has to be on a Linux mashine. Another thought: Software made in schools or may be by pupils for schools doesn't need DRM. Texts made for the school by teachers in their worktime are anyway copyright of the state. Why should the state get an head ache with DRM to distibute such kind of texts within the schools? I still don't see any _better_ reason for MS (except commercial) than for Edubuntu (a Ubuntu-Linux version with educational programs).