Linux.com

Not just American schools! English schools are also being held hostage. They have a deal that they receive revenue for every computer that is in an English school, and this is not limited to Windows computers. If a school buys a Mac then Microsoft gets money! Amazingly the crooks at BECTA are looking to renew this fraudulent deal!!!

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This is part of the reason that Zimbra (Exchange replacement) will help throw MS out of education. Without Exchange, AD becomes replaceable by OpenLDAP. Without AD, you can throw away Sharepoint ... use Alfresco instead. That kill the MS-CAL licenses for file servers, exchange, and MS-SQL-Server ....

All of these replacements have support contracts available, so there is strong commercial support, should you need it. OTOH, if you have a small team of experts, you can probably get the FOSS versions up and running in less than a week and never need to pay anyone for support outside your current staff. If you are an enterprise looking for support, that's fine - compare $15k per year to whatever you're currently paying MS. I worked at a place where we paid MS over $5M/yr in support and licenses.

Best of all, all those replacements don't require MS-Windows. They work with whatever clients you like ... well, that isn't entirely true. Zimbra FOSS doesn't do any calendaring with Outlook 2003 and perhaps 2007. Is that a bad thing? Show the CEO the cost savings as you propose removing exchange/outlook from your stack. Show him OpenOffice and Zimbra ... and include the commercial support you require. If that doesn't get support from the top, I don't know what will.

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