Extremadura Measures: Linux

Following the lead of poorer countries worldwide, Spain's Extremadura region adopts Linux as the official operating system of public schools and offices. By Julia Scheeres.

The poorest region of Spain has adopted Linux as the official operating system of public schools and offices, in hopes of improving the area's vast technological and economic lag.

The move by the Autonomous Community of Extremadura, a rural zone that borders Portugal, will mark the first time a European public school system has switched to open source, said Luis Millán Vázquez de Miguel, the community's minister of education, science and technology.

The government has burned 80,000 CDs with the Debian Linux operating system and software ranging from text editors to an Internet browser. The disks will be sent to the area's 670 schools and distributed to the public through newspaper inserts.

Largely bypassed by the industrial revolution, Extremadura has pinned its hopes on the technological revolution.

"Making free software available -- that we've designed for use in an educational environment, but are offering to all citizens for personal or professional use -- is a key part of technological literacy," said Vazquez de Miguel.

The project was born out of the need for cheap, easy-to-use systems to equip the region's 32 technology centers, where citizens can take basic computer courses free of charge. The government estimates that free software will save the community about $7 million a year.

Extremadura is also building a regional intranet that will link 1,478 government offices and schools by the end of the year. The region is already ahead of the national curve as far as school computer inventory in its schools; Extremadura boasts 15 to a computer, compared with 33 pupils per computer country-wide.

Governments in developing regions worldwide have eagerly embraced the open-source movement as a way to trim fat from their budgets. But free software initiatives fail when officials believe they will no longer have to invest in their IT systems. Take the case of Mexico's Red Escolar, launched in 1998 to install Linux in the country's 126,000 public schools. The government simply shipped CDs to schools without training teachers how to use the operating system or contracting programmers to administer it.

That won't happen in Extremadura, Vazquez de Miguel said.

"The decision to incorporate (Linux) is not an isolated decision, nor is it limited to handing out software," the minister said, adding that training Extremadura's 15,000 teachers to use the system and to incorporate the computers in the classroom has been a government priority.