Open Source Software and Open Content have particular relevance to the education and training sectors for a number of reasons:

• Often specific versions of educational software will be required to reflect particular course content or pedagogical approaches.
• A loose ‘community’ of educational institutes already exists which supports the exchange of ideas and concepts. Thus, the basis of an OSS community is already in place.
• In many cases, larger institutes already have the human resources capacity in-house (through their departments of informatics or computer science) to perform the necessary software modifications, testing and deployment.
• Educational institutes are under increasing pressure to find the lowest-cost solutions for effective course provision.
• Learners can be involved in improving OSS software making it possible to take an approach which sees education as the process of supporting learners in joining a community of practice.
• More generally, the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) in education provision is being recognised and explored.

However, despite much interest form the educational software community and from individual education institutes and providers, there is a lack of clear and unbiased advice and information over the advantages and disadvantages of OSS and how appropriate the adoption of OSS is for education and training and of policy advice and direction on the subject. In this paper Graham Attwell will provide an introduction to the issues involved in the development of OSS and consider their overall implication for the education and training community.