Mark Shuttleworth who has initiated the SchoolTool project wrote:- 1. Free vs Proprietary. A regular debate. My own position is that a free (as in speech) product gives anyone with the skills to make their own choices a useful option. From a support perspective it means sophisticated engineers have access to the source code so they can fix it themselves, and there are likely to be a variety of commercial organisations providing support for the product on a commercial basis because they have access to the guts of it, and can find and fix problems for a fee. SchoolTool has to be freely available under an open source licence to ensure that any school that wants to adopt it can do so without having to pay a licence fee. Those who are saying they prefer commercial support contracts have a point - we would be foolish to think everyone will prefer software libre, some people like the comfort (even if it's illusory) of a commercial licence and support relationship. That's why we also need to have the muscle to offer support contracts and commercial licences to those who want to. That's why we need the dual-licensing option. This will (I hope) also ensure the long-term sustainability of the project, a la MySQL. 2. Quality. There are a number of folks concerned with the quality of a non-commercial product. Well, many of us know that SOME free software projects have produced exceptional quality software. But the SchoolTool project has yet to prove itself in this regard. I'm willing to put a certain amount of resources into it to get it done, because I believe it could make a difference and be a success, but only time will tell. Let's work hard and then let history be the judge. We can't make any predictions here. 3. Switching costs. People have rightly identified that there are substantial barriers to switching, even if the new product is 'free' (of fees and restrictions). We will have to focus hard on those barriers if we want people to migrate, even if in OUR minds the product is just as capable, we need to ensure that it's perceived that way out in the wild.