All previous snipped: I wonder if we are losing track a little. Open Source is not the same as no cost - I only remind ;-), and has the advantage of very rapid development and "repair" because of the number of brains involved. It can be marketted and supported as "normal" purchased software but my experience is that the community support just as well as any service agreement. The problem for me was always convincing the civil-service mind-set of the administrator that conventional wisdom and EULA advice were often not sufficiently well-informed to give appropriate advice. I had persuaded my old school that Open Source was viable but the big stumbling block was lack of a good replacement fro SIMS - had there been, they would have converted both admin and education systems. Instead, they struck up a love affair with M$ and I left - they have just committed a vast sum to convert the entire school to Windows on Citrix - just think what I could have done with LTSP! Not only is the school admin software project desirable as a project in its own right but it could be the very lever required. No-one at school liked SIMS - there was no real alternative. Now, perhaps, there will be and by being both "libre" and "gratuit" it must stand a good chance. My suggestion would be to use a multi-platform IDE and MySQL so that they can learn to trust it on another platform then discover that a platform change would involve no cost - that should please everyone! It worked for a couple of my local business clients with OO.org and a migration from Oracle to MySQL for a spare-parts database! -- Best wishes, Derek