It comes from topic Big Changes Comings. > Yea, it is pretty sad. I'm American, but I live in Mexico. My girlfriend goes > > to UABC here. The teachers require work to be in .doc .xls and .ppt > The funny thing is, I don't even think the teachers have legitimate copies of > > MS Office. It's all pirated. Their ignorance has them not only using > proprietary formats when for their uses free software and formats would work, > > but also pirating software. This then in turn is basically a green light from > > university faculty that the students should pirate the software too. I don't > know many mexican UABC students that can fork out for an MS Office license > when the license is twice their semester's tuition. > > It's a sad state of affairs I've brought to their attention time and again > and they do nothing about it. I've been tempted to turn them in for piracy > and condoning piracy, but on this side of the border I don't think anything > would happen to them. Not so much that I care about pirating Microsoft's > software, but it'd sort of stick it in their face that they either need to > change, or be fined.
Yeah. Really sad. I always doubt which will be the correct way to show them the case. I want not to seem anti-system, also to start talking about freedoms probably frighten them (sad too). Maybe a possible approximation is: "It cannot be. You teachers obtain illegal copies of the software. Teachers ask (more or less indirectly) to obtain illegal copies of the software. But the point is that you really don't want this software in particular, it is only a tool that we use by habit. Also, there are free of charge alternatives to that software which are as good as the others and also they have been created because authors have thought before that this situation is not sustainable. Let's change to LibreOffice (or what it be). There will be no problems: program is free of charge, it has no virus and is 10 MB of size. No one can be disturbed by that." A teacher said me the other day that my problem was "very particular" for not to use that software, and then he was not considering it seriously. Maybe the class is no the correct moment for talking about that with the teacher (as student) so she want to use that time for another explanations. Maybe is better to visit her and exhibit the fact.
