I was very shocked and angry when reading how narrow mined your school seems
to be. Maybe things are different in France but I suspect you just had
exceptional bad luck with the school you've ended up with. I'm in Germany
(more precisely, at the KIT) and after the second semester they wouldn't have
forced me to use a single proprietary tool yet. Maybe this is just huge luck
that I haven't been aware of until now. Many professors here would suggest
using tool X which, most of the time, already is free software but wouldn't
mind if we'd use a different one if we could achieve the same goal with it.
For example, in our software engineering class we were recommended to use
Subversion for version control but had the freedom to use any other tool we'd
prefer. (Some folks would use Git instead.) Quite understandably, the
instructors can't offer help for all tools out there but if you are fine with
free software, you will certainly be fine with teaching yourself via RTFM.
(Which, by the way, might be quite superior to what is offered in some
classes.)
If you could imagine spending a year in Germany, please let me know if I can
help you with any organisational stuff. I can't promise that there are no
classes here that require using certain tools but at very least, I could find
out for you in advance.
I can't really believe you are the only student in your class that is in free
software. Do you have any mailing lists for the class attendants? We've had
some (technical) discussions about free software on ours. I think using them
to ask who would collaborate with you using only free tools would be
perfectly legitimate use. (And if it would happen on our list, I'd
definitely know at least one person who would reply.)
As you've mentioned yourself, I don't think that just learning a proprietary
technology is an entirely bad thing in itself. Quite the contrary, I think a
good software engineer should know about as many technologies as possible;
even if only to collect arguments against a crappy proprietary tool for the
next discussion. Our university offers so-called pools with many computers
running all kinds of operating systems. So if I'd like to try something out,
I could go there any time without installing the proprietary product on my
own machine.
All the best for you and for your freedom!
