The Polish municipality of Jaworzno is migrating all schools to open source. Money saved in this way will be used to increase the number of computers for use by the students, reports Osnews.pl, a community-based IT news site.
The 27 schools in Jaworzno currently have 553 computers available. Moving to open source should help double this number.
Without open source, the Jaworzno municipality estimates it would have had to spend about three million Polish zlotys (about 680,000 euro) on proprietary software licences and new computer equipment. Moving to open source will reduce the costs by three quarters.
Some of the schools in the Jaworzno municipality already have some experience with open source. The Jaworzno Group of Linux Users in 2002 helped schools set-up GNU/Linux computer labs, using the Polish PLD and Aurox GNU/Linux distributions.
The Jaworzno Linux User Group is also involved in the current project to migrate all PCs in all schools.
"We had positive experiences with open source in our municipality" says Maciej Bak, senior IT manager at the Jaworzno city council. "Moreover, we haven't yet experienced any big difficulties."
He says the three main reasons for the local authorities to decide to move the schools to open source are the current financial crisis, the successful implementation of GNU/Linux in several schools in Jaworzno and the positive experiences with GNU/Linux outside of Poland.
Poland wants school pupils to be able to work with computers from primary schools onwards. The ministry of Education has developed a new policy 'One student, one workstation' to come into effect in September 2012.
More information:
TVS news item (in Polish)
OS news item (in Polish)