As quoted from SEUL, issue 46...

Edward Moriarity recently told us about Linux use at his school district:

Linux has been a great operating system for the Glendale Union High School 
District (Glendale, Az.). We run our "home grown", business basic, student 
accounting system (Grades, Attendance, Transcripts, Discipline, Personal 
Information, etc.) at each of our 9 high schools. Each school has a server 
with RedHat 6.0 and a basic emulator sold to us by BASIS Int. We manage 
the systems and distribute updates via our WAN. This configuration is 
completely scalable and affordable for any size school.

Some of you will recognize BASIS as the maker of Business BASIC, a version 
of the BASIC language that was used by many small shops to write custom 
applications to run on MS-DOS systems. We talked a bit about Glendale 
Union open-sourcing their software, which they may be interested in doing, 
but the Business BASIC initially seemed as though it might be an 
impediment. It might be possible to look through the code and reimplement 
it in another language, but that might be fairly labor-intensive. Luckily, 
a search turned up three different implementations of Business BASIC for 
Linux: Production BASIC, ProvideX, and BBj. The first one is GPLed, the 
second we're not sure about, and the third is commercial. These packages 
have the potential to open up a mass of niche applications to Linux; it's 
worth your while to take a look at them.

The full address for SEUL is http://www.seul.org
-- 
Jim