I've been a bit of an open source advocate for some years, though can't claim much technical expertise in linux/xyzBSD. For me its an ideolological thing and also a small blow agains the corproate takeover of the world by the evil empire (USA armed with nukes and space borne weaponry to impose by force their financial scams of the WTO, general agreement on services which is even more evil than the WTO provisions etc. rant foam rave). But seriously, I've had a consistent response from teachers (I'm a governor at a Primary school) and it is to do with support and costs. Essentially - RM provide everything they seem to think they want (though how much they know about what they want is an open question, IYSWIM) and a single point of support. And they don't think it is going to disappear - there is a local horror story about a IT support tech at a Middle School (we run a 5-9, 11-14 and 15-18 first school, middle school, secondary school system here, though that is changing starting this year to conventional primary/secondary). who set up something complicated on a network, didn't quite do what it was supposed to, and then disappeared with no one to support it. I dunno if that was open source stuff or not... But it does provide a stimulus to conservatism, does that story. I haven't yet found out the costs of the RM support and provisions, nor whether it is an annual contract cost, or whatever. That seems to be very hard to come by - I suspect that it is quite pricey and a lot of it somewhat hidden costs. Anyway, what sort of bottom line provision can one get for proper support, software installed and working, ongoing support and maintenance, appropriate educational materials for the various key stages etc. and still remain out of the clutches of Microsoft? I'd like to shift our cost spend from paying for software to paying for the labour costs of value added services, which is the basis of the economics of open source anyway IMHO (and a more moral position too boot, but lets leave this out of the query for now!). Anyone got anything for me to start building a case upon? Hard figures please :-)