Enterprise open source Toolkit

Story: Schools face software licensing clampdown

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Open Source companies DO supply their software products free to schools, not only for evaluation by students, but permanently and in perpetuity. The Open Source business model is simply, and understandable. Services that you need to USE your software are what you pay for.

Hardware has become commodity, you can get a complete system for a few hundred pounds (even less when you consider you are paying for an operating system with it whether you want it or not).

Software is becoming commodity. Open Source recognises that the marginal cost of reproduction of software is.... well, nothing. And the value is in what you DO with it - tell me, how much is your software package 'worth' when your proprietary vendor pulls support for it?

No, Open Source recognises that what the customer wants, is the services (or know-how) to actually do what they got hardware and software to do in the first place. And that is what Open Source businesses charge for - the deployment, maintenance and support of world-class collaboratively developed software.

http://www.opensourceconsortium.org is the site for the organisation mentioned in the article.

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