Verona is about to become famous for more than just Romeo and Juliet and opera: the university of the romantic Italian city is migrating 4000 of its desktops to Linux and open source.

"The SELF Platform is a web platform for the collaborative construction, editing, remixing and translation of educational materials. It is an educator-centric production environment for learner-centric materials. To ensure the spirit of collaboration all materials are under a free license, which can be used, reused, modified and distributed freely.

Michael Gibbons, director of science and technology policy research at Britain's Sussex University, said universities must abandon their centuries-old model of linear knowledge transfer and instead open their doors and minds to knowledge exchange with competitors and students...He cited as a model the development of the open-source Linux computer operating system, freely available and able to be modified, used and redistributed by anyone.

The Canary Islands have two derivatives of Kubuntu, one which is being installed in all their schools and one used by the largest university. The Jornadas de Software Libre conference at The University of La Laguna, took place in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, from the 18th-21st September 2007. It was organised by the university’s Software Libre Office (OSL).

Around 560,000 German students plus thousands of staff at 33 German universities will now be supported by Linux systems from Novell.