Open Source Software In Education Pushed By Government

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n lobbying for proposed changes to the U.S. commercial code that would effectively criminalize reverse engineering.

It’s not enough for scientists to use open-source software; they must also use an open-source operating system. Colleges and universities can help to assure the ubiquity of open-source software and operating system usage in science by moving to Linux as an international standard for academic computing.





Computer Literacy, Yes--But What Kind of Computer Literacy?
Let’s turn from professors to students and examine another area in which the use of commercial, closed-source software is rapidly growing: the computer literacy curriculum. Even if it is admitted that open-source software is needed at the research level, skeptics will counter that colleges and universities do not exist in a vacuum. Whether we like Microsoft or not, they will argue, we still need to teach students how to use the software they will encounter after they graduate--and that means Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Among those pushing for...