As I work in a highly Windows-centric institution, I find ways to slip the OSS message any way I can.

- One semester we discovered that our TCP/IP text (from MS Press, using NT 4) had gone out of print, I seized the opportunity to change to Douglas Comer's 'Internetworking with TCP/IP', the text I learned from in college and still one of the canonical works. I loaded the student PCs with Linux and we used all of the nifty networking tools (including ethereal to examine network traffic) to explore the topic in much more detail than the MS book did.

- The 'sister' course to TCP/IP was Directory Services, so I kept the Linux workstations and we build an OpenLDAP directory service from scratch incorporating Kerberos authentication. The response from my students to both courses was overwhelmingly positive. (In fact, I got an award that term based on my student evaluations.)

I hand out OSS CDs to my students every chance I get. I post links to and encourage them to build their resumes by volunteering for an OSS project.

Slowly but surely it's having an effect. We did a network rearchitecture about a year ago that was budgeted at $80,000 (with Win2K) and we used existing hardware, Solaris 8 and Linux and came in under $10K.

I'm noticing a growing dissatisfaction among students at a steady diet of pure Windows. They see the growth of demand for UNIX skills in the real world and are pressing for more cross-platform experience.