On Fri, 11 Jan 2002, Mark Evans wrote:
A good day - low Linux presence :( Indeed one of the machines on the Fen System stand was running Windows.
...in order to demonstrate Cygwin/XFree86 and show people how they could dip their toes in the water by giving everyone access to Linux on the desktop without first ditching their existing Windows installations! It was good to meet several of you at BETT, although I'm still puzzled by the curious fact that almost everyone here chose Thursday. Those that didn't make it will probably be pleased to know that the interest in using Linux was phenomenal: at least an order of magnitude higher than last year. On Thursday and Friday we were busy throughout the day (Wednesday and Saturday are the quiet days at BETT). It was interesting to see that the resistance to using non-Microsoft products was very, very low - only one person that I spoke to said that they wouldn't consider Linux because of their existing commitment to Microsoft. The new MS licensing schemes are predictably unpopular and this is not helping RM; Connect version 3 will apparently be XP based and so schools wishing to remain with RM may have to upgrade all their hardware to be XP capable at the same time as paying for an RM upgrade and XP licences. All in all, a very successful show. I was particularly pleased to be told about two open-source school management information systems that were nearing public release. More to follow later... Michael