Dear Sandra Pupatello
p2p news / p2pnet: I wrote the following letter to the Ontario Minister of Education, with a copy to my MPP for Ottawa South.
Dear Hon. Sandra Pupatello, Minister of Education, Minister Responsible for Women’s Issues
Copy to Hon. Dalton McGuinty, Premier, Minister of Research and Innovation, and member for my riding of Ottawa South.
I was just told a good-news story about a Toronto area high school computer science teacher who has been using the Linux operating system exclusively in his classroom for the past 5 years. Linux is a very well known collaboratively developed operating system that is not only free for teachers and students to use without additional payment, but also provides the source code so that students can dive deeply into how the software works. Linux provides the same level of access to prior knowledge that students need to learn as providing books in English class provides. Protecting the ability of people to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software is how Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) is defined, with Linux being one example of FLOSS software.
The bad-news part of the story is that the school recently dismantled the already running Linux lab and told the teacher that he *must* only teach Microsoft software. Microsoft jealously guards the source code to their software, disallowing teachers and students from studying and improving the software. This is like disallowing English students from reading or building upon existing literature. While Microsoft software might be of limited use for teaching word processing, it is quite inappropriate for teaching computer science. Microsoft software is also funded by royalty-based business models which extract considerable amounts of money from provincial budgets, while FLOSS allows the educational sector to collaborate with all sectors to create software that is then distributed at a marginal cost of zero.
I would like to be told what policy this school was using to justify dismantling this lab and harassing this teacher. Does the Toronto District School Board have an exclusive agreement with Microsoft? Does the Ontario Board of education have an exclusive agreement?
Please provide me details. I am an Ontario citizen who works and volunteers with FLOSS software. I believe that the future of education is tied to the move away from royalty-based methods of funding the development of knowledge. Knowledge has a marginal cost to the producer of zero, and with new communications technology it is possible to harness this trait of knowledge and allow the marginal cost to the customer to also be zero. FLOSS and Open Access initiatives allowing the educational sector to collaboratively work with other sectors to develop knowledge using methods that will not only reduce costs on the educational community, but will also free that knowledge for the benefit of all humanity.
(Full contact information was provided — Please ensure that any letters you send to elected representatives contain your full contact information!)
Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
June 28th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
Interesting and understandable, but futile and unrealistic.
Some of the realities are these:
1) Do those of you who support the concept of “FLOSS” make a living at anything? If you do, why do you charge for it?
2) There may be more to the educational goals of the particular institution than you think. I would be quite pissed if my training had been in an area where employment was scarce when a similar curriculum could have been provided that furthered my career goals.
3) If I were seeking employment – with recompense – as a programmer, I would be much better off knowing .NET and MS stuff than Linux. Similarly if I had the next great thing in my head and it was some kind of program, I would build it for MS boxes because my market would be many times greater. Were I in need of collaborators, I would turn to those educated/experienced in the MS world long before those from the Linux area.
Not that I think Linux is bad or MS is superior or good, but educators must address the realities of life as well as the esoteric.
Remember Beta was technically better. Wanna buy a VCR???
Yahoo!
(Registered but unable to log on!)
June 29th, 2006 at 12:15 am
You are talking to someone who does make a living at FLOSS. In fact, most money in software is made in support services around the software and not on royalties (monopoly rents). There are a few companies who made money selling software in the past, but outside of the video game market (which is more entertainment than software) and a few legacy cash cows (Microsoft only makes money on Windows and Office) this legacy industry is in a decline — and being replaced by the growing FLOSS marketplace.
There was a time when selling horse shoes and hay was big money — and then along came the automobile.
As to “knowing” Microsoft software, we aren’t talking about teaching a word processing course here, but a computer science course. With Microsoft software you are only legally able to be a “user” of the software, while with FLOSS you can learn how the software works and improve upon it. With FLOSS it is like studying Shakespeare in English class, learning from the past and being able to build upon it — possibly creating your own plays. This type of learning is simply not possible when students don’t have access to the source code that they can modify and see what happens.
If they want to teach C# and .NET it is far better to learn these standard languages and execution environments with Mono on Linux, where they have access to the source code of everything. They ‘might’ translate that into a job for a Microsoft customer in the future if that was their job opportunity, however given the trends I’ve been watching I highly doubt it. The technology market changes quite quickly. The jobs in the future will be in follow-on services to software, a marketplace where FLOSS is growing far faster than our competitors.
My experience has been that it is far easier to take someone who is trained on an Open Systems environment and put them in front of any future environment, than it is to take someone who is trained on Microsoft and have them use anything else. The purpose of education isn’t to make them addicted to specific brands, but to ensure that they can handle whatever they are put in front of.
June 29th, 2006 at 2:32 am
” The purpose of education isn’t to make them addicted to specific brands, but to ensure that they can handle whatever they are put in front of. ”
That is the purpose of education, however, SCHOOLS focus
on propoganda and programming the young.
Sucks big time.
June 29th, 2006 at 4:21 am
I would very much like to see what the Ontario school board has to say about this. If you do get a reply from them I would be very glad to see it.
curtis119 at gentoo dot org
June 29th, 2006 at 6:18 am
So the province of Ontario believes that it must turn out lots of little obedient Wintel drones? That’s what happens when you let the government run education!
June 29th, 2006 at 11:45 am
Surely, though, anyone who’d learned on Linux could pick up Windows in a heartbeat. Can you say the same about someone who’d learned on Windows?
June 29th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
“3) If I were seeking employment – with recompense – as a programmer, I would be much better off knowing .NET and MS stuff than Linux.”
Bit confused by this statement. When you obtain a degree most colleges don’t teach any one language but how to program correctly in all languages. The design process/lifecycle is the most important not the language you happen to be coding in.
Also when you look at the lastest Webhosting numbers you’ll see that Apache running on linux is number one. Are you telling me to have students ignore the number one solution as a potential employment opportunity? And where your comment really falls short is how many of today’s desktop apps are being moved to the web. Gmail, bloglines, etc etc.
As for your FOSS is free statement; tired and old. Ever hear of a company called Red Hat? Ever hear of MS charging companies extra for a service contract? If so then why can’t people in the FOSS (please note the last word is software) area charge to support freely distributed SW?
(rolls eyes)
June 29th, 2006 at 3:35 pm
One of the rolls I have is as a curriculum advisor to Algonquin College in Ottawa. One of the complaints the advisory board has heard from employers (including very large government and private sector employers) is that people with FLOSS skills (Linux/BSD Mozilla/OpenOffice.org, knowledge with business models/licensing, experience with collaborative development processes and multi-sectoral development teams) are few and in high demand. Because of supply and demand these skills cost far more than the “dime a dozen” Microsoft certified people. They have been demanding more Linux certified people to try to bring these costs down. Lack of adequately trained and certified people has also been a barrier for many companies to migrating to FLOSS, something which many understand the long-term benefits of doing.
The flip side of this is that there is a very large financial benefit to those students who learn FLOSS skills early as this puts them into a market where they can make far more money than they can with Microsoft skills. There is a larger expectation, as you are no longer just clicking-buttons on a specific version of a GUI interface, but expected to understand much higher-level skills such as the inter-personal relationship skills required to get a patch into an active project.
June 29th, 2006 at 8:45 pm
yes, and what is more, after someone has learned windows, they are totally out of date after a while, because they are not dealing with fundamentals, but with a product.
June 29th, 2006 at 10:20 pm
I’ve also written to Sandra Pupatello, and sent copies to my local member of the Ontario legislature and my Toronto school board trustee.
The M$ software that these kids use will be long obsolete by the time the kids hit the workforce or institutes of higher learning.
Besides, education is about teaching concepts and ideas not about training people how to use a product or delivering future customers to a transnational software conglomerate.
Also, as a taxpayer I resent my hard earned dollars being used to line the pockets of a convicted monopoly corporation when high quality software is available for free to anyone who wants it.
Schools should be about empowering students to make critical decisions about the kind of software they use.
This is a horrible decision and I’ve linked this article to other sites in the hopes that others will see the error of this government’s ways.
June 30th, 2006 at 1:11 am
Would you consider making your letter public? If you have a blog, post the article and link to it from here. If you don’t, then consider posting it here or on http://digital-copyright.ca/
The more people who make their letters public, the more people who might feel comfortable writing their own letters.
June 30th, 2006 at 4:53 am
Of course, getting a job isn’t the only goal of education. But if it was you might be interested to know that there are a great many Linux jobs. There are lots of companies running Linux — they don’t like the Windows lock in. In Ontario there’s a little consulting company called IBM that routinely recommends and installed Linux for blue chip clients.
June 30th, 2006 at 9:36 am
1) Is software a means to itself, or just a tool? If software is just a tool to get other jobs done then the FLOSS model makes perfect sense. It also makes sense that users of a tool are able to collectively improve its design. Yes the traditional proprietry software model doesn’t do so well out of this, but software is a tool not an end in itself.
2,3) So you are trained in Dot-Net 2.0 and Office 2003. You haven’t been taught any underlying principles. Do you understand word processing, as in word processing itself not just the location of the Bold button in the Office 2003 interface? Have you studied design patterns? Do you know the pros and cons of the choices you can make in software – or do you merely know how to drag a text box onto a form in Visual Studio?
If you only know Office 2003 and Visual Studio’s drag and drop form designer then you are not skilled in computing. By the time you leave college your skils may be out of date or something better may have come along. Learn the real concepts and principals – and you can do this perfectly well in Linux / Java / Open Office or even LaTeX – and you will be set up for life. Unfortunately too many people are not skilled in computing.
June 30th, 2006 at 9:36 am
“If I were seeking employment – with recompense – as a programmer, I would be much better off knowing .NET and MS stuff than Linux”
60% of jobs in Dice.com or Jobserve are related to Unix/Linux which means Linux is a much more viable path that .NET or MS stuff to seek for employments.
Maybe you are computer illiterate enough to think IT science is all about installing Office and cleaning windows viruses, but think twice, do you really think industry software runs on buggy Windows machines. Do you think telco, energy or engeniering companies, the internet of your city traffic controls runs on Windows. None, absolutely none of them run of windows.
If student get miss-educated on the M$ world they will be doomed to a world of “swaping viruses” and pressing “next-next-next” to install stupid and unesefull Office and Adobe software. On the opposite if they get edducated the High-available 24×7 Unix world they will get a change to have well paid jobs.
June 30th, 2006 at 3:10 pm
No kidding. Objecting to “bureaucratic abuse” at a government school is redundant!
One of the really nice things about F/OSS is that people can run it themselves on down-grade hardware without asking anyone’s permission.
Smartest thing this teacher could do is hand out KNOPPIX or another live CD to the kids and say something like, “I’m not allowed to teach you this in school, but I can’t legally give you any of the software we use here. So go use this instead.”
June 30th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
The first comment was clearly from someone who _doesn’t_ make a living in the technology industry and isn’t aware of RedHat, Novell, IBM who provide Linux services (and that Oracle is being compelled to bring out their own distro) or HP and Dell who sell computers with Linux installed. Nor are they aware that the internet runs on FLOSS. Nor are they aware that Linux system admins make 20-30% more than Win admins by virtue of their much greater productivity.
Nor is he/she aware that Norway, Chile, major US school districts, parts of S. Korea and S. Africa are using the same technology in schools that, afaik, was being used in this Ontario school.
Nor is he/she aware that within a few years, web-delivered software such as zohowriter and easywriter will take a major share of the now propietary “office” software market – and this is what Steve Ballmer has nightmares about.
Nor are they aware that virtually every movie they now watch uses Linux cgi effects.
But to the point of education – the real objective of the letter: an Italian educator put it well when he objected to the “let’s teach Microsoft in schools” as creating a generation of “mouse-clicking monkeys”. FLOSS offers the same functionality as propietary systems. But further, it allows students to take control and understand the software itself. In English and Math classes, students are taught not how to calculate expense reports but to understand the underlying concepts of language and math.
As well, the financial considerations are immense. Not only for the schools, many of which spend half or more of their technology budgets on licensing alone but to the students themselves. We’ve created a generation of haves/have nots – those who most desperately need the education don’t have parents who can bring home a copy of Powerpoint from the office.
FLOSS/Linux works wonderfully in school As the kids say at our school when a computer occasionally boots back up in that “other” OS: “What happened to the good screen?”
June 30th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
The purpose of public school is three-fold:
1) To keep bright, motivated young people out of the work force as long as possible, and to steer them into spending yet more of their lives in post-secondary “education” so they do not endanger the existing union-government power structure.
2) To keep discontented young people in day-prison where they can be tracked, and through continuous failure teach them that they cannot contribute to society. Minimum wage and “child labor” laws ensure that there is no functional alternative for such young people in the historically successful forms such as apprenticeship.
3) To bore and tire the students as much as possible, to teach them to comply with and depend upon arbitrary rules and bells, in order for there to be as great a number of compliant workers and reflex voters as possible.
Therefore, forcing Microsoft software is perfectly rational given the purposes that public school was established to fulfill.
June 30th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
I work for a very large Canadian division of an ever larger global IT services company. We have a rapidly growing business of helping companies migrate from their old Windows and DOS systems to Linux. In fact, we are growing SO rapidly that we have had a lot of trouble finding enough professional level hires with the Linux skills that we need. The demand out there for Linux skills is real, and growing at an enormous rate.
June 30th, 2006 at 4:42 pm
I learned on Unix and VMS. But I simply can’t understand Windows. I find Windows very difficult to use. It’s counter-intuitive to me.
June 30th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
Now that Warren Buffett has agreed to turn over $37B to Bill Gates you can expect an infinite supply of “free” MS software in schools forever. One of Bill’s foundation’s goals to improve education. To Bill that means give away software to schools for free. All Bill has to do is charge full price for the software he donates. Since MS software is almost all profit just think how much software Bill can provide for even a third of $37B. MS simply puts most of Warren’s donation in their pocket. Now we know why Bill is the richest man in the world and why Warren WAS the second richest.
June 30th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
1) Indeed, a very good living. It makes sense to charge for certain software and not for others; it all depends on usage and liability. For example, you would expect a very large office building would require mountains of legal work and engineering documentation before it would be built, which costs a lot of money. If you expect to pay the same for your house, then you should probably find another house.
2) Its unrealistic to assume that all students comming out of a highschool programming course will be able to cope in industry, as much as it is to assume that someone who has taken a highschool phyics course can build a bridge.
3) While you can probably find a part time job with .NET, you’d find yourself hardpressed (you’d be lauged at) if you tried to use your experience to find yourself a full time position. There are many windows applications that are built with tools ported from linux. Its very hard to cope with a plastic toy when what you really need is a power saw.
July 1st, 2006 at 3:58 am
I love it when you talk dirty.
July 1st, 2006 at 7:46 pm
wow – you haven’t spent much time out of Redmond have you!
1 – There are plenty of people who make a living supporting FLOSS, have you ever heard of Novell? There is quite a bit of benefit to more than the grass root hackers you are probably envisioning. The less it costs to have a secure OS in your entereprise the better the bottom line.
2 – The educational goals of any institution should include making people understand the evolution of the field of study, and that which makes it tick today.
3 – Learning .NET and Visual Studio are trivial for someone who has been well educated in almost any other high level programming language. One should not become so dependent on a suite that will do 90% of the redundancies – and learn to crawl before you walk.
Don’t confuse this with a marketing/business model equation, because I would have a hard time spending a dime on a VCR if the Beta machine was free… I hope others have this sense too.
Robert
http://www.coarseblog.blogspot.com
July 2nd, 2006 at 3:42 am
I couldn’t have said it much better! BRAVO.
I have been turning many windows users to Linux just because it is a better solution. Of course I am simply cutting my throat because FOSS is so reliable (what are viruses, etc.), that I will not be making any MONEY!!!! and then again I say who cares, at some point there has to be an upgrade I can charge for (not).
Just kidding, I have many converts and I am still making dollars via FOSS.
July 4th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
Beta was PROPRIETARY, like MICROSOFT.
B
July 5th, 2006 at 10:58 pm
I don’t agree with the first part of the last paragraph, but philosophically agree with the last part. Even though it isn’t going to happen.
Almost no-one knows how a television works past “A ’station’ sends a signal and a ’set’ shows it.” Damn, I designed and built tube amps, and still don’t get why transistors work. But I have built very complex electronic boxes using chips and my friends the npn variety of transistors. I don’t know why they work but I know how to work them.
As for communications technology, try this on for size. Wired telephone systems run off DC power – in North America, 48 volts. At the switching centre, all power ultimately comes from two bus bars – a positive and a negative. Power goes through your phone, gets modulated by a variable-resistance microphone with the result that sound comes out the other party’s earpiece. Since we’re all on the same power source at the switching centre, why can’t we all hear each other? [Forget about repeaters, concentrators, and the electronics in your portable phone. They are merely improvements on an old system. This problem occurred when the fourth phone was installed and two calls could be made simultaneously.] The point: we can use things very effectively without understanding how they work.
Now to the FLOSS or F/OSS issue you all bashed me for at the beginning. Maybe, just maybe I’ll upgrade the version of Linux I am running to see if the more recent stuff is less bizarre, a little more accepting of standards – even simple things like HTTP aren’t that good on the version I am using, and it would be nice if the various amusing offerings worked in similar fashions to each other.
And, mayhaps I will put an Apache box on line as well, just to see what happens to my sites. I know it is faster, but when last I gave it a shot several years ago, it lacked EASY connectivity and development tools weren’t all that great. Admittedly I am reluctant to change languages and tools simply because I am usually in a rush to get things done and use what I know will work.
And I see you all hate my first comment, BUT… I use Firefox – a decidedly quicker, easier to use and better product, but my web sites, none of which are for programmers, all show an 80-82% MSIE use. I haven’t checked to see if IS is available for Linux, but I suspect not. That means at LEAST 80% of the people surfing my crap are Windows folks.
July 17th, 2006 at 12:32 am
The reason 80% of your hits are from IE is because (a) they don’t have a choice, such as in schools, (like the TDSB, which MANDATES the use of IE 5!?! on its CTMI win2000 images) or (b) they simply don’t know there are better alternatives (see (a) again)
December 15th, 2006 at 7:38 pm