A few very simple points about how Ireland can save money and implement strategies to make our education system more competitive. First of all in Ireland the education system is full of windows computers or mac if like my old school they have a little extra money to spend. Here is the obvious points.
1. Open source software is cheep or even free so the only cost is implementation
2. Its useful in the base system for GNU/Linux desktops has office software and many other tools for free unlike windows and mac which you have to pay for.
3. Its faster than windows
Now all that being said 1 major selling point of GNU/Linux is that it is a true multitasking OS, you can have hundreds of processes and hundreds of different users logged in at one time. This is very useful because instead of just one user on one computer you can have one server running an entire school for the price of monitors keyboards and mice. The second reason FOSS software should be used is that for each windows computer you have to pay for a licence even if you don’t know your paying and that is quite the opposite in FOSS. The third reason is that the source code is available so there is unlimited possibilities so you can have your class room internationalised to the language of the students breaking down that barrier. Ubuntu in particular is translated into Irish which could be used as a way to keep Irish relevant.
So Free, useful, fast, cost efficient hardware wise, no licence per computer and the unlimited possibilities is why the Irish government should choose Open source software.