I had an interesting experience. I recently was asked to speak at a
college in Springfield Mass. about Linux by the college's computer club.
The college is a typical institution of higher ed: they're in bed with
Microsoft, have a grant from them, and all their classes are geared towards
MS products. Students at the college have to take classes at the local
UMass branch to get any Unix experience.
But anyway, I did the typical "free beer, free speech" routine, advantages
of the open source development model, talked about GNU and Linux, outlined
what's available; all in all nothing awe-inspiring.
When I was through, one very interested student was asking how much it
would cost to equip some older machines at the college with Linux and a
free word processor or office suite. I answered nothing. He seemed
perplexed. I again said nothing, and again explained that if you wanted to
buy a copy of Red Hat, Corel, etc., that you could, but that was only
needed if you required the printed manual and support and I again mentioned
CheapBytes/LinuxMall (et al) and the <$5 CDs which have no support. He was
simply amazed.
Now, this chap could've been just simply dense, but I was in awe at how
many of the group are in the total mindset of "software ain't supposed to
be like that". I thought I did a pretty good job hitting the free price,
free liberty ideas, but I guess maybe I should drive the free price thing
home harder for students!
Other interesting impressions: Students want Linux badly (this entire event
was pushed hard by the students). It's not only the "it's cool" or
"anti-MS/anti-establishment" angles, but all of the CS students I talked to
were dead set against buying more "mandatory" software which will be
obsolete by the time they get out of school. Also, there was an amazing
attendance by non-CS majors (for some reason, communications people seemed
to almost outnumber CS types). FWIW, the school was also developing a
degree as a web specialist (I forgot what they called it) and besides
requiring 2 (yes, 2!) classes in FrontPage, there was not a class in perl
required (or even offered); I thought that was pretty amazing.
FWIW,
.
Randy
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