Douglas Crets:

Here is the opening paragraph, which includes a pretty big number, but I don’t know what this writer means by “the educational community”, or what he means by “support and services for open source software by 2012″:

The educational community has discovered open source tools in a big way. Analysts predict that schools will spend up to $489.9 million on support and services for open source software by 2012, and that only includes charges related to operating systems and learning management systems. Teachers, professors and home schoolers are using open source applications as part of their educational curriculum for a wide variety of subjects.

There is no link to the number or to the analysts, so I don’t know from where the information comes. I’d like to say right away that I don’t like that the writer of this blog post is saying that these open source tools “replace” existing tools or software. I don’t think there is any way for one person to measure that. I think it is helpful, though, to say that these open source tools may work well in cooperation with existing software, or as accents for software that already exists.