F/LOSS in education sector

Experts claim that developing countries will reach higher rate of F/LOSS adoption in most of the sector. This results in significant opportunity of development offered by F/LOSS to developing economies. In regards to the highest use of F/LOSS by industries, education sector will lead the chart. In 2010, this sector is expected to use most of the solution provided by F/LOSS; that is 80% of the application used by education sector for educational activities would be F/LOSS. One of the important relevant factors for this is the presence of educational activities in F/LOSS at educational sector. Major F/LOSS projects are related to education industry and most of these projects are promoted from scientific field (Gallego et al., 2008). Educational sector is well positioned to benefit from the alternatives that F/LOSS provides (Guhlin, 2007). Education sectors have accelerated the use of F/LOSS software and the leading ones are utilising it to enhance the education and facilitate students with innovations that proprietary software failed to (Derringer, 2009). Lin and Zini (2008) have argued that education sector using F/LOSS to assist in teaching and learning has more potential of inspiring and invigorating learning than those using the proprietary one. It’s also fascinating to see the fact that some education sectors have not only been teaching their students to use F/LOSS application but have also encouraged writing some of their own according to their needs (Derringer, 2009).

What some companies does is that they provide a legal copy of their proprietary software to education institute for free so they get the students and teacher addicted to the software. But then the students and teachers have to buy legal copies for their home workstation. These companies are not donating the legal copy for a moral reason but they are simply marketing it. The educational institute later might have to pay to upgrade these donated copies of software.  The education institute should teach their students to be independent, to live in a free society but they can’t achieve this if they depended on proprietary software. Some students are curious and they are not satisfied by just what the software offers, they want to know how it works. The students should have the right to study the source code and given the opportunity to modify and extend the source code to meet their imaginations (Stallman, 2003).

Tong (2004) said that F/LOSS has gained its popularity mostly in the developing countries and is growing rapidly. He argued that F/LOSS plays a very important role in education sector especially for the developing countries.  He has identified lower costs, reliability, performance and security, building long time capacity, encouraging innovation, open philosophy, learning form the source code, possibility of localisation and alternative to illegal copying as to of reason why F/LOSS should be used in education sector.

REFERENCES
http://pravab.blogspot.com/2011/09/references.html


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