By Paul Nastu

In Kearney, Mo., district IT director Keith Waller recently established four new classroom labs for teaching with technology. Each includes an interactive whiteboard, a teacher workstation, a teacher laptop, and a student-to-computer ratio of 2 to 1. The computers in two of the labs run on Microsoft's Windows operating system, while those in the other two labs are powered by Linux, the open-source software platform that is mounting a growing challenge to Microsoft's dominance in the computing world.

Not only did the Linux-based labs cost half as much as the Windows-based labs to equip--but system upkeep is much easier, too, Waller maintains.

Jim Klein, director of information services for Saugus Union School District in Santa Clarita, Calif., is another proponent of Linux. In 2004, Klein and his technology team began the ambitious task of migrating the district's entire network infrastructure to open-source solutions. While most of the classroom and client applications throughout this 10,000-student district still operate on a Windows platform, all of its server and back-end systems are driven by open-source software.

And Klein couldn't be happier. Not only has the open-source migration resulted in a cost savings for the district, he says, but the infrastructure is faster and more efficient than ever.

Ron Gerstenmaier, principal of Norton High School in Norton, Ohio, has a similar story. Norton High School has been using open-source software for six years now, according to Gerstenmaier. Not only does the school pay a fraction of the cost it would require to run proprietary software programs, but "we've never had a virus problem--and the downtime is zilch," he says.

Open-source software still comprises a small share of the technology in K-12 schools. According to Quality Education Data, fewer than one in five school districts surveyed last spring (19 percent) had Linux installed on at least one server, compared with 86 percent of districts that had at least one Windows server.

But the landscape appears to be changing: The K-12 Linux Terminal Server Project, which has taken the Linux operating system and customized it for education, reported that the number of downloads of its software increased tenfold--from 15,000 copies to 150,000--from 2001 to 2003, the last year for which statistics were available.

At a time when budgets are so tight, it would make sense that a growing number of schools and other institutions would turn to a solution that is free to license and distribute. But many schools are citing enhanced stability, too, as a primary reason for making the switch from proprietary to open-source software.

School IT personnel today are besieged with a flood of new security patches they must download, install, and test each month for their servers running Windows, a favorite target of computer hackers. Proponents of Linux argue the system is more stable than Windows, requires fewer critical security updates, and provides a more cost-effective and reliable computing platform.