Open Source | Close Wallet
For those of you who don't know me, I'm a big advocate of the Open Source community. True I'm not 'creative' enough to be of any actual 'help', but I'm keeping the faith that one day I'll use my experiences to do something super useful to the beloved Open Source community.
This topic is brought to my attention because of the FireFox 3 T-shirt design contest, I was at their site reading about the contest when I saw that one of the criteria of submitting a design, was to have the image created in an SVG program, such as Adobe Illustrator, or Inkscape [a FREE SVG program], so I got super excited about it. Because Inkscape reminded me of Open Office [a FREE word processor suit] & Blender [a FREE 3D animation program]. I also recently found out that there is a Photoshop-like open source program called Gimp.
My question is this. Why aren't school utilizing these tools, true the work field asks for experience in the 'real' programs, but if these are available to students (and everyone else) for FREE, than I'm sure they will be more inclined to use it, first off they won't have to pay $300 for a watered down version of the actual product, and they will not need to illegally find a way to get a copy of the program.
Besides, if we start enforcing these producing into the school system, than the job market will have to adjust their standards to what is being taught, especially if they are as good as the real thing.
I do think that if we start using these products more, then it will catch on. Look at Open Source Operating Systems, such as Linux, Unix , and all their flavors. They are being used in third world countries to teach children and people about technology. The digital gap is narrowing, and fantastic open source products are coming out every day. We seriously need to start embracing this, as soon as I get my bachelor's degree, I'm formating my mobile laptop to Ubuntu (which is currently a 2nd OS on my other machine), and I'm going to start running all these great products so I could actively help the Open Source community, you should try it, its good for you, really =)
Have a good day everyone.
-Ash
This topic is brought to my attention because of the FireFox 3 T-shirt design contest, I was at their site reading about the contest when I saw that one of the criteria of submitting a design, was to have the image created in an SVG program, such as Adobe Illustrator, or Inkscape [a FREE SVG program], so I got super excited about it. Because Inkscape reminded me of Open Office [a FREE word processor suit] & Blender [a FREE 3D animation program]. I also recently found out that there is a Photoshop-like open source program called Gimp.
My question is this. Why aren't school utilizing these tools, true the work field asks for experience in the 'real' programs, but if these are available to students (and everyone else) for FREE, than I'm sure they will be more inclined to use it, first off they won't have to pay $300 for a watered down version of the actual product, and they will not need to illegally find a way to get a copy of the program.
Besides, if we start enforcing these producing into the school system, than the job market will have to adjust their standards to what is being taught, especially if they are as good as the real thing.
I do think that if we start using these products more, then it will catch on. Look at Open Source Operating Systems, such as Linux, Unix , and all their flavors. They are being used in third world countries to teach children and people about technology. The digital gap is narrowing, and fantastic open source products are coming out every day. We seriously need to start embracing this, as soon as I get my bachelor's degree, I'm formating my mobile laptop to Ubuntu (which is currently a 2nd OS on my other machine), and I'm going to start running all these great products so I could actively help the Open Source community, you should try it, its good for you, really =)
Have a good day everyone.
-Ash
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