Re: [school-discuss] Some questions about OSS in education:

["Jeremy C. Reed" <reed@reedmedia.net>]

On Sat, 14 Aug 2004, Randy Edwards wrote:

>  > 1 Suppose in the future most of the k12 schools us OSS as ICT tool,then
>  > when we look back,what is mark of the beginning of OSS in education?
>
>    The entire Free Software Foundation was founded at MIT in 1984 as a result
> of the non-academic/non-open/restrictive nature of commercial software; that
> software went against the grain of the open, probing quest for knowledge that
> is typical in higher education, thus spawning a reaction.

In the 1970's, the public domain Ingres database was developed at the
University of California at Berkeley. It was distributed on tapes.  Its
development went a couple different ways including commercially and also
as open source Postgres (and then PostgreSQL).

Also at UCB, in the 1970's and early 1980's (and beyond) work was done on
a variety of software, such as vi, termcap, TCP/IP implementation, mail
handling systems, fast file systems, et cetera. (BSD: The Berkeley
Software Distributions)

The O'Reilly book "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution"
is a good book to read about open source history. It is available for free
on the web.

>  > 5 What is the percentage of the k12 schools that use OSS instead of
>  > Microsoft's product now in your country?

Even in Microsoft country (the Puget Sound region in Washington state),
many schools use open source software. I do work for local schools that
use Apache, PHP, Linux, and other open source software. Some organizations
that support technology for public schools in the area run and publically
advocate Linux and open source and sometimes provide classes (which I
have taught)  for school IT personnel from throughout the state. In fact,
one school actually teaches a Linux class; but I don't know of any
Washington-state schools that use Linux on the desktop for students or
staff.

 Jeremy C. Reed

 	  	 	 BSD News, BSD tutorials, BSD links
	  	 	 http://www.bsdnewsletter.com/