In 2001, Indiana officials at the Department of Education were taking stock. The schools had an excellent network infrastructure and had installed significant numbers of computers for 1 million public school enrollees. Yet students were spending less than an hour a week on the computer. It was then that state officials knew each student needed a computer, and Indiana's one-to-one initiative was launched. But how were they to pay for such a huge project that would have cost $100 million a year in software licensing alone? The often-misunderstood technology ( thought of as "just free Web 2.0 stuff" by the uniformed) has been the answer in Indiana--and a growing number of school systems across the country--to shrinking school technology budgets and soaring software costs. Today, more than 100,000 Indiana school kids (in all, 300,000 high schoolers are slated to receive one) have their own $298 computer and monitor with numerous free software applications, and, in turn, schools across the state have secure, reliable, sophisticated server systems because of the Linux-based open source technology. In this article, the author discusses the Linux-based open source technology and presents two case studies of Linux solution in California and in Maine.