OStatic

Last fall we heard the news that Russia mandated all schools in the nation must use free software. The transition was to be completed by the end of 2009 and the number of computers running free software in Russian schools was expected to top one million by 2010. Unfortunately, things haven't gone quite as planned.

Installation disks were recently shipped to school districts and contained four different GNU/Linux distributions so schools could choose the best distro for their particular hardware. A mistake was made by one of the companies responsible for assembling the software, rendering the disks completely unusable.

The Linux Foundation has added another member to the fold. mimio, creator of the only interactive teaching platform available for Linux, joined the foundation and plans to use popular tools such as the 'App Checker' to ease code development as it makes Linux applications more portable than ever before. Having educational software and appliance vendors on the membership roster of the Linux Foundation is a terrific way to reinforce that open source technology is indeed compatible with the needs of educators and learning institutions.