It’s 11:43pm on a Monday night. My 6-week-old son is asleep in my office so my wife can get some uninterrupted rest for the first half of the night. He’s finally asleep now, and I probably should be also after a full day of work. But I’m not done for the day. Even though I’m a software engineer by trade, I’m also a computer programmer by hobby and passion. So I do what I’ve been doing for well over a decade now: I boot up my computer to write some code.
We can make some headway by pushing govs to adopt OSS. The Italians have a law “public money → public code”. The whole public sector including public schools should be switching to open source. And part of that would compel contributions of some form. Whether it’s code contributions or payment for support. People should be demanding that their tax revenue is not wasted on software that does not enrich the commons. With profit-driven corporations it’s always a game where a number of variables have to be just right for the company. But the public sector is very much overlooked.
I recently looked at a Danish university and was disgusted with what I saw. They used MS Office and Google docs, and students were pushed to use those tools. They used Matlab not GNU Octave, because that’s what they saw industry using. Schools should be leading industry, not following it.
The main driving force behind use of proprietary software in educational institutions are the software companies themselves. They have an incentive in it. When the students graduate and join the workforce, their employers are more likely to choose the software that these new workers already know. So it’s like an investment for software companies to get their software into the curriculum. They spend considerable money and effort into it. Regular people stand no chance in pushing for free software - mainly because most of them don’t even care.