About - Free and Open Source Educational Software

The World of Free and Open Source Software

On the OS school DVD you will find a collection of Free and Open Source software for educational use that run on Windows. The aim of this website is to make finding the software easier by categorising them by Key Learning Areas used in Education in Australia. In addition, under each category, links to useful websites that provide information or free resources are listed.

Run or Install software

Search catalog and install open source educational software for Windows
Start as a live DVD to run educational software (requires 512MB of RAM)
Start DVD from QEMU virtual machine within Windows (requires 1GB of RAM)
install accelerator Kqemu before running to acquire reasonable performance
Note: Themed CD versions run faster and require less RAM and are available.

Reasons to use Open Source software:

Lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for school and students;

Open Source comes with Source Code that allows users to customise the software;

Often uses GNU General Public License http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
more free licenses are available at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category;

Professional Product developed by companies, government departments, universities
for example Sun(provides OpenOffice and Java), Mozilla (iprovides FireFox, Thunderbird and Sunbird);

Rapid development cycle - end users report problems directly back to developer;

Works well on older hardware as software is often built with performance criteria; and

Greater learning of concepts rather than products.

Freeware Copyright 2007-2008 GNU General Public License
OSWINS DVD was built by Neville Richter - http://os.cqu.edu.au/oswinsdvd