aliasbody -
You are benefiting from having these at your fingertips:
- Options to use free/open software on top of open hardware like ThinkPenguin
- Choice in programming languages that are open and well documented
- Ways to learn those programming languages without setting foot in school
- Run languages like Java on a VM supported on a majority of systems
- Established and royalty free file formats that are standardized or will
soon
There are still some things rough around the edges like Microsoft's grasp on
the educational market and universities getting students locked into Windows
and Office programs and internal sites requiring a non-free plugin like Adobe
Flash or Silverlight.
What is my ideal world? The important establishments like government, schools
and libraries would be utilizing open hardware running a totally free
operating system like Trisquel and the software that comes with it saves in
open and standardized formats. Users should be taught how to use the
fundamentals of a word processor or spreadsheet instead of just learning the
Microsoft products. On top of that, only buying accessories that are free
software compatible and easily portable.
Biggest of all? Piece of mind that content created with a computer or mobile
device is able to be opened many years from now with little to no issues.
There's never been a guarantee of that with Microsoft in the past with their
binary .doc, .xls, and .ppt formats, but if you do your papers in
OpenDocument, you are making one step forward in making computing a better
place.
