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In the 90s in the UK, school kids like me used Acorn Archimedes and related systems in school. Then on leaving school we went into workplaces or universities wh

by mprev 6y ago

In the 90s in the UK, school kids like me used Acorn Archimedes and related systems in school. Then on leaving school we went into workplaces or universities where Windows based PCs were dominant. Schools need to use and teach the technologies that children will encounter in their daily lives, not those that tick an ideological box.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
December_Stars 6y ago
And how will we start the change to more open systems, except by starting in the start of the workforce chain in schools? Imagine if schools starting teaching everyone Blender over Autodesk Maya, for instance. We create a workforce where most people will end up knowing Blender over Maya. At that point, there is a compelling reason for enterprises to switch, and we see a world in which Blender becomes dominant and where people will encounter it in their daily working lives. There are practical reasons to do this - Blender is free so schools pay significantly less, it still has its usage in freelance/smaller companies, and it has a wealth of resources from its large community on learning it compared to Maya. Many free/open source software suites are similar in these aspects compared to their proprietary counterparts. This, alongside the ideological reasons, is enough to switch. And the ideological part matters too! In the English classes I've taken they regularly teach individualism and critical thinking. Why then, should we take away that thinking aspect when it comes to software and just tell students "use whatever they use, don't question its ethics?" We have to start somewhere, and there's no better place to do so than schools, where it still benefits the school and students overall to use free software over proprietary software.
emptysongglass 6y ago
Except if you're a developer and you're coming into the workforce today, I am going to be far more likely to hire you if you run Linux than Windows. My startup lives and breathes Unix/Linux tooling because it's the best toolset to work with. But it didn't start that way. It started as an idea and took the next twenty years to become the leviathan of corporate tech today. Somebody had to breathe fire into that idea and spark a life. When our tooling is open, everyone benefits. We need to learn to look beyond our self-serving natures and nurture unbound software, even if that means a little discomfort now for a greater good tomorrow.

by mprev 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

December_Stars 6y ago

And how will we start the change to more open systems, except by starting in the start of the workforce chain in schools? Imagine if schools starting teaching everyone Blender over Autodesk Maya, for instance. We create a workforce where most people will end up knowing Blender over Maya. At that point, there is a compelling reason for enterprises to switch, and we see a world in which Blender becomes dominant and where people will encounter it in their daily working lives. There are practical reasons to do this - Blender is free so schools pay significantly less, it still has its usage in freelance/smaller companies, and it has a wealth of resources from its large community on learning it compared to Maya. Many free/open source software suites are similar in these aspects compared to their proprietary counterparts. This, alongside the ideological reasons, is enough to switch. And the ideological part matters too! In the English classes I've taken they regularly teach individualism and critical thinking. Why then, should we take away that thinking aspect when it comes to software and just tell students "use whatever they use, don't question its ethics?" We have to start somewhere, and there's no better place to do so than schools, where it still benefits the school and students overall to use free software over proprietary software.

emptysongglass 6y ago

Except if you're a developer and you're coming into the workforce today, I am going to be far more likely to hire you if you run Linux than Windows. My startup lives and breathes Unix/Linux tooling because it's the best toolset to work with. But it didn't start that way. It started as an idea and took the next twenty years to become the leviathan of corporate tech today. Somebody had to breathe fire into that idea and spark a life. When our tooling is open, everyone benefits. We need to learn to look beyond our self-serving natures and nurture unbound software, even if that means a little discomfort now for a greater good tomorrow.