> There is no excuse to teach/use/promote any of the propriety software in schools. Of course there is, especially for vocational schools. If you're targeting

> There is no excuse to teach/use/promote any of the propriety software in schools. Of course there is, especially for vocational schools. If you're targeting a career, you want to learn the software that is most often used in that job capacity, so you can put that on your resume and improve your chances for landing a job. It's somewhat different for primary and secondary schools. Generally these schools do not teach individual programs. Instead they teach concepts, and use the program as learning aids. From that perspective, the most important thing the software can do is to just work, and then get out of the way. It's more important that students learn mathematics, than it is for the educational programs to be open source. > If people not force-feed Excel, Word, Photoshop, Matlab etc. during their education days still want to use that for convenience later in their career - let them. Just give them real choice by educating them with open tools. The vast majority of Excel, Word, and Photoshop users cannot directly benefit from open-ness, because they are not programmers. Matlab may be an exception.