Hi Tony (hope you are well by the way - long time no see) It's a tricky one and I can only relay my own experiences. My son and daugher are 9 and 6 respectively and have grown up only knowing Gnu/Linux at home. They use windows occasionally at school but mostly just as a web-browser for flash. My son gets a laptop next year as he moves into year 4. It is a school laptop - there is no option to BYO and it runs only windows 8. I've spoken to other older kids at his school and they all seem to hate them - not just crap software but the hardware seems pretty flakey too. A few parents that come to techspace have talked about forming a group to lobby the school about their poor choices - it's a private school that is not cheap so understandably they are annoyed. My own kids comment to me that the computers at school crash a lot and I have been able to explain this to my 9 year old son why this is and the differences between operating systems. The best I have been able to do so far is to just educate them - my son has told a few of his friends at school about Linux and hopefully his advocacy will continue. We run a minecraft club on Saturdays at Techspace which my son is also involved with - all our machines run GNU/Linux at the techspace and quite a few kids have now dual boot installed it for better stability on their own machines. We do talk a little about software freedom, but so far it's been mainly stability that sells it. I hope to gradually introduce this to the kids, parents and teachers whenever I can. I'm finding the sales job on this stuff no longer a stuggle - we've had quite a few tech-savvy teachers come to us who are pretty good on Linux (quite a few drawn in by python & raspberry pi) Steve ps. yes - and I have heard that MS will most likely be buying Mojang/Minecraft.... poo!!! On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 1:10 PM, Tony Morris <tonymorris@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello FSB, I am a programmer working for NICTA at Spring Hill. I was directed to this mailing list by a friend who I meet at Brisbane Functional Programming Group (BFPG). I have been using functional programming in industry for about 13 years. I am a former lecturer at universities, however, I became somewhat disillusioned to the university agenda around 2007 (long rant omitted).
I have been a relatively passive advocate for free software for approximately the same amount of time. I do not take a stance on the issue of free software as I see many others do.
I have children, now aged 11 and 13 who are beginning their high school education. Both of my children have grown up using the linux operating system and related GNU software at home. Their school has proposed a "bring your own laptop for education" program. The proposal specifically mentions that Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX be used. I do not know if this proposal intends to insist on either of these, or if they are listed merely because parents may be wondering if perhaps their existing laptop meets the requirements. For example, the proposal may intend to be diverse, but inadvertently only lists Windows and Apple in an effort to convey that diversity. The proposal then goes on to talk about "meeting minimum requirements" and discusses anti-virus software and so on.
Nevertheless, I have decided to take a stronger stance on this issue in that my children will not be using Microsoft nor Apple operating systems. I am looking for advice on how to approach this issue, because I have not taken a strong stance like this before. Whenever I worked in say, a corporate environment that "makes sure your windows updates are up to date" (for example), I have simply worked around whatever nonsense was put in front of me and with little protest. This is usually because I have some other orthogonal goal and so don't have the inclination to address the issue directly. In this case, I think the above proposal works directly against the goal (education) and so I am compelled to intervene.
If anyone has tips on this matter or has addressed a similar issue before, I would greatly appreciate hearing about it. Thanks for listening.
_______________________________________________ Free-software-bris mailing list Free-software-bris@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-b...
-- Refactor. Engage | Succeed | Repeat tel: +61 (0)7 5668 3424 mob: +61 (0)414 464564 web: refactor.com.au