[Fsf-friends] IT = M$window + M$word ?

[Vijay Kumar]

Quoting Raj Shekhar <rajshekhar@hotpop.com>:

> H S Rai wrote:
> > Following is the syllabus for the students of all engineering
> > colleges, which teaches MSwindows and MSword. 
> 
> Most people passing out of colleges have a knowledge of working on ASP
> and Oracle. It is very hard (impossible) to get freshers who would be
> able to work on PHP, which is the most popular language for server side
> scripting. Speaking of Oracle, you would be surprised to know that most
> freshers think RDBMS = Oracle.

Not really. I am final year student of an engineering college(NITT, formerly 
RECT). We use MySQL for most of our local databases. And all the old Foxbase 
databases are being converted to MySQL. And PHP is being used for server side 
scripting, for all intranet sites. All our intranet and internet webservers are 
powered by Apache.

But I don't think, using MySQL, PHP or Latex will have any effect on the 
attitude of the students. What we need is a change in the attitude of the 
students. 

When I joined my college I found that many of the students were not willing to 
show the source code of their programs!(Eventhough they had no idea of making 
money by selling the program). One of the guys, sent us the assembly dump(gcc -
S program.c) of his program, when asked to show the source!

I was horrified by this attitude of the students. One thing I did to change 
this, was to start a source code sharing site. I called it the CORE - COde 
REpository. A common place where students can upload their programs(along with 
the source code) and can share programming tips and tricks.(The home page of 
the site, encourages the students to use the GPL license. It also has links to 
essays written by Richard Stallman)

Seeing many students share their source code, the same guy who sent us the 
assembly dump, uploaded his program on to the CORE along with the source code!

Today, CORE is celebrating the addition of the 50th program to its repository!

I guess, similar steps in other colleges is what is needed.

Vijay

-- 
Free the Code.
Free the User.

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