Global Community Software and Saveing Schools

I have always wondered why there isn't more use of Open Source software in United States' schools.  Sure I have seen Firefox catch on, but all browsers are free of cost today.  So why did Firefox catch on in the first place.  I think its a given that Firefox caught on because as we all know, unless you have been living in a cave, Firefox is faster and more secure than what most versions of Internet Explorer are.  This proved OSS (Open Source Software) could be better than commercial alternatives. 

Now what about replacing monstrously expensive programs like Blackboard.  Blackboard runs a minimum of $10,000 per year but typically runs colleges $25,000 to $75,000 per year.  There are much cheaper OSS alternatives that have virtually the same features and can even be further enhanced because of their open nature.  Blackboard could be replaced with Moodle, or Sakai which have a free price on their tag and can be self-hosted.  Sakai I find particularly interesting, its made with leadership from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with its original grant coming from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New York City.  Sakai allows for online document distribution, a grade book, discussions, live chats, assignment uploads, and online testing, plus more.  Moodle is comparable but was not founded in the U.S.  Moodle is from Australia but has been in development for a little longer, 15 years.  There has been some progress in crushing the cost of LMS software for schools.  Some schools are migrating away from Blackboard to the alternatives.  Blackboard had over 90% market share in 2006 and since 2010 the alternative software have reached over 30% market share.  I urge schools and any organization that requires educational learning software such as hospitals to utilize and improve open LMS software, by helping improve your LMS you are not only improving it for your students but you are providing a free service to the rest of the global community.  I am talking about those kids in Africa, India, and other parts of the world. 

Other areas of software that may be useful for schools to save on and improve for the global community by using and improving open source software include:

1. Libreoffice in place of MSOffice for most students
2. Switch to an open ERP such as... OpenERP
3. For medical and mental services in nursing offices or particularly in Universities OpenVista, FreeMED, or OpenEMR
4. For School Homepage a CMS like Joomla, Wordpress, or Durpal
5. For the Library use an open ILS like Evergreen or Koha
6. For Math SageMath, wxMaxima, ect.
7. For Programming, Eclipse, Netbeans, QtCreator, ect.
8. For Art and design, Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, BlueGriffon, ect.
9. For additional free education software and to replace Windows for most students try Ubuntu or Edubuntu which has great computer lab management software.
10. Other school related open source software to fill in the nooks include: SchoolTool, Project Fedena, A1 Academia, Gibbon, OpenSIS, and you can Google for more. 

Schools should regularly look at BOSSIE to find the latest and greatest open source software to teach with. If we can migrate everything to OSS imagine how much we could save tax payers and tuition spenders.  All of this savings put together should save hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions over the years.  The Federal Government is starting to use more OSS why not the local. Bill Gates says how he wants to donate money back to the schools, well if our local governments wouldn't have wasted so much on commercial software we would have that money now to pay for better teachers, books, and technology.  Lets not continue to make this mistake.

Refer to http://schoolforge.net/ for case studies.