[FSF-India] GNU/Linux in Schools

R Sai Kiran fsf-india@mail.gnu.org.in
Thu, 2 Aug 2001 19:24:03 +0530 (IST)


Hi,

> What you should do is write to the heads of few colleges and schools about
> Free software  offering a talk and demonstration. 

	We've actually got lot more work to do before that. I'd seriously
suggest that the "GNU/Linux for Schools Project" be added to the FSF-I
Projects page in the FSF-I website. We *need* volunteers. What I think we
should do is decide upon a set of software most relevant to schools and
pack it up into a CD. What should be included and what should'nt can be
the subject of an interesting thread. I mean, some of the members of the
list may have objections in including stuff whivh is not 'GPL'ed. But, I
think that any Linux distro which does'nt have, say, Pine, is BAD (just a
personal opinion, I *love* Pine). 


> Talk should stress more on the philosophy of 'freedom' and demo should
> talk about the technical merits. If you can rent an LCD projector and
> show something like 'gimp', even the diehard Window user will have
> second thoughts. 

	Oh, there are far too many things we can talk about, which I'm
sure will impress the Windows guys. I was actually asked to give a talk on
GNU/Linux during my summer job. Unfortunately, that got packed due to the
political happenings in Tamilnadu that weekend :-(. I had prepared a good
list of stuff to talk about. GIMP is definitely one of the best
examples. Others would be the ability of Abiword, Gnumeric etc. to save
files in PDF format, the X-window system, the KOffice suite (I have'nt
really used it extensively, but it's cool. You can embed a doc in a chart
etc.), the Apache webserver (which Microsoft still uses on the Hotmail
servers) ... the list just keeps going on and on and .....


> If you don't talk about the philosophy behind 'free sofware', always
> there will be people trying to compare MS with GNU/Linux by bringing
> out irrelevent details. It is difficult to convince an average user
> about the quality and reliability of an OS but he will easily see the
> 'advantage ' of having two more fonts supported by his word processor.

	Yes...the main purpose is to spread the philosophy. But, we
should'nt directly attack from the philosophy point. Talk about ths
different software tools you get and how the "freedom" makes life happier
to you. Also, a small comparison between the MS End User License Agreement
and the GPL will drive the point home *very* elegantly :-) 

	Please feel free to condemn my opinions. 

Regards,

Sai

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R Sai Kiran	http://www.che.iitm.ac.in/~ch98086