Governance2.Org

Hindu: In the largest such simultaneous deployment of ‘free-and-open’ software in India, over 15 lakh Kerala schoolchildren on Friday start taking their quarterly practical tests in Information Technology on personal computers using a special Linux version.
The IT@School project of the State Education Department has developed an operating system based on the Linux version Ubuntu. Called IT@School GNU Linux Version 3.0, it was distributed to 2,832 high schools — over a thousand of them government schools, the rest aided and unaided ones.
Between September 7 and 22, children of Classes 8, 9 and 10 will use some 30,000 PCs to do their quarterly practical examinations in IT.
The State’s path-breaking e-learning initiative Akshaya had raised popular expectations, but the cost of proprietary software licences in bulk was unaffordable. This led to the State emerging as a pioneer in the use of Open Source resources in a host of education and e-governance projects