One of the great announcements made at FISL this year was that the Brazilian Ministry of Education is currently in the process of deploying 53,000 computer labs with all open source software and 52 million students will have access to these labs. The computers in the labs will be running a Linux distribution called Linux Educacional which is based on Debian and KDE as a desktop. By the end of this year, there will already by 29,000 of these labs open and available! Each lab contains a server and 15 terminals to use. Many of the slides from the presentation are online and translated to English. Doing some rough estimates, even if Microsoft gave a 50% educational discount, the cost of this project with Windows would be $79.5 million USD (around 100 million Reais, the Brazilian currency) before even one computer was made available because that would just be the licensing fees. A project like this enables one to see the scope of the benefits that open source provides — given the state of public schools in the United States, it is nearly a crime that almost every school district continues to pay our tax dollars to Microsoft.