http://epidm.edgesuite.net/RBI/computerweekly/CWRES/HTML/SurveyResults2.pdf
This highlights the uptake of OSS various sized organisations have done. MS is unsurprisingly the winner. The trialled statistics are interesting.
Implications for education?
1. MS dominates and therefore we should make sure we are using MS products to best prepare our pupils for their futures.
2. Using OSS in education is clearly more important as we remove obstacles to use OSS by providing rich and dependable experiences for our young people who will feed this into industry.
3. Other.
What do you think is most important?
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What matters is trends not points on the graph. If you had done a survey like this 5 years ago and 5 years before that you would conclude that there is an accelerating trend to FOSS. On that basis using MS because it is currently dominant is a very bad understanding of mathematics. What is needed is support for business models that will under-pin FOSS development and take up in the medium to long term. A strategy to immediately shift to open systems via web based applications. (an e-strategy :-) ) Very bad things to do are to install infrastructure that locks you into legacy desktop applications or proprietary web technologies and any LA consultants that recommend this should be lined up and shot by BECTA :-)
A similar logic logic would lead us all to use internet explorer, whereas other browsers have seen significant uptake in this period, though possibly not as great as the proponents claim.
@Optymystic,
I agree, for example Firefox recently only managed to gained 30m users in eight weeks: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,1000000097,39841085,00.htm.
The interesting thing here to me is that this is a real decision made by users to install something else. Windows still has the monopoly on the desktop and comes with IE (OK I know about Win7 but that isn't on the radar yet) but people have gone out of their way to install Firefox or Chrome in it's place and in growing numbers.
Also, the use of FF in the EU is higher as a percentage and some countries, from what I've read are approaching 50% usage.
If only it was the same for GNU/Linux or OpenOffice.org, although that is nearing 20% globally which is very significant.