Last week, when I asked “Are you sure you don’t just want to use Ubuntu?” I received a record number of talkbacks, good, bad, and in between. One of the more interesting, though, came from reader ksheppard, who responded with a challenge:

…Here’s a challenge to you: Make a list of everything - absolutely everything - a hypothetical school superintendent would be required to do to switch his personal laptop (which he uses at work and at home) from XP to Ubuntu, while maintaining, as much as possible, his usual behavior. Allow your blog followers to critique and refine the list until you think it is reasonably complete. Then have the research staff at ZDNet assign time and money expense to each item on the list. Allow your blog followers to help you critique and refine those figures.

Whaddaya think?

I think I wish we had research staff here at ZDNet, but I also think that it’s a really useful exercise to undertake. I think our district represents a good starting point for the exercise since we don’t actually use any applications in the superintendent’s office on the desktop that don’t have an open source alternative. As ksheppard pointed out, some districts may have bus routing applications, for example, that are Windows only.

More here