... The British educational IT agency Becta says it is not acceptable that schools using GNU/Linux and OpenOffice are required to pay Microsoft licensing fees. Becta brought the issue to the attention of the European Commission. In an interview with the UK IT website Computerworld, Stephen Lucy, Becta executive director, says his organisation wants to prevent schools from being disadvantaged by restrictive licensing agreements imposed by a dominant player. "Schools using Microsoft's School Agreement licensing model, are required to pay Microsoft licensing fees for computers based on Linux, or using OpenOffice. Finding ourselves in a position whereby a school pays (say) 169 GBP (216 euro) for a device only to be faced with for example a 30 GBP (39 euro) per year after year payment to Microsoft, for a system that is not running any of their software would just not be acceptable to Becta. Indeed I don't think many people would consider that fair." According to the Computerworld interview, this is one of the issues Becta raised with UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) in October 2007. Lucy says his organisation in January this year contacted the European Commission "to ensure that the interoperability matters we had initially referred to the OFT are now addressed by the Commission's new investigation." ... http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7541/469 -- http://olpc.ellak.gr