In blogging Sam's, Dave's and my presentation on Drupal in education, Harold Jarche cites two of the slides offering a particular bit of commentary to one of our points:

Reallocation of funds from site licensing fees into learning opportunities for students. [I like this one!]

To me, this is one of the stronger, unexplored benefits for education of open source LMS use. Consider service learning. Think about the benefits of having students participating in open source projects funded by some of that money normally allocated to site licensing:

• Computer science practicums where seniors or graduate students create new or refine existing parts of the LMS.
• HCI projects where students evaluate the LMS to suggest usability improvements, both the software created by the open source community and the institution's particular implementation.
• Web design project competitions for building alternative site themes for use by the open source community and/or the institution. Students would get a real kick out of designing a site theme that other students might use in their course. Students would also appreciate having a design portfolio that could point to sites on the web using their community submitted theme.
• Instructional technology/distance education projects for analyzing the pedagogical effectiveness of LMS implementations, suggestions for improvements, and specs for new LMS learning software modules, specs that could be implemented in computer science practicums. Students at larger institutions could also work directly with community colleges and K-12 to offer recommendation reports for their implementations.
• Many of these students could also work with community colleges and other institutions to help them implement an open source LMS.

Each of these not only gives students experience in working directly with institutional IT and the open source programming community, but benefits the institution and education at large. Seems like a win-win situation to me.