> maybe we should teach the students how to use tools that work without all this extra cost and nonsense. Maybe we oughta collectively write better open source

> maybe we should teach the students how to use tools that work without all this extra cost and nonsense. Maybe we oughta collectively write better open source software if we want to opine on what schools should do? Gimp doesn’t have to suck, but it does. I say that with true love for gimp and admiration for the people who write it, and I can’t complain about it because I’m not helping write it. (But that is an option, you and I could contribute to gimp.) Part of the problem is that neither of your analogies are relevant in practice. Gimp isn’t a cheaper less automatic Photoshop, it’s a tool that often doesn’t meet professional workflows at all, and certainly wasn’t made kid friendly. It’s not the same tool and can’t do the same things. Also my kids were taught both gimp and photoshop, and they hated gimp. (And adobe makes photoshop available to schools for relatively cheap, compared to retail.) The analogy about the software being serviceable is not going to fly in schools. Submitting patches is not something teachers can do. Submitting bug reports isn’t either. So what good is a theoretical idea that the software is open? The only thing schools can do in practice is pay money for support. And money is the single biggest problem they have. Vague concerns about privacy and lock-in are just way down on the list of school & teacher priorities, right? I’m wildly in favor of having good open source software, of avoiding education market capture by for profit companies, and having insanely better privacy controls. Open source sounds awesome, but I think it needs to improve before we start demanding that people use it or teach to it.