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Open-Source Technology:

How open-source technology serves to improve equity in the classroom. Open-source software, especially when provided under the GNU license, provides classrooms with high-quality productivity tools that can be made available to students for use both at school and at home. Because of the ability to easily adapt or "port" the code, the best open-source software is available for all of the modern computer platforms.

Many school Information Technology (IT) departments and administrators might say, "We get excellent licensing and support from our software providers, and we can't get that from open-source applications". This point of view doesn't consider several other factors (1) few licenses permit students to take and install the software at home, or if they do, they limit that instillation to a single machine. (2) Support for open-source software is often provided for very low cost by purchasing a specific support license from the provider, or specialty firm - which is the business model used by many distributors of open-source software, such as Mandiva, or Red Hat, two versions of Linux, (Linux has grown to become the second most commonly installed desktop operating system in the world, with fewer users than Windows, but more than Apple). Furthermore, with product activation having become the rule among large software firms (including Macromedia/Adobe, Microsoft, and Symantec, among others), maintaining software on desktops in classrooms has become an ever more time-consuming nightmare for IT personnel as they are constantly trying to keep up with changing hardware and software upgrades, complicated by byzantine and often changing product-activation processes that multiply the complexity of system maintenance. The solution? Turn to open-source, which features comparable productivity and reliability, but is easier to manage in terms of licensing, and permits ALL students, regardless of their financial status to have equal access to high quality tools, both at school and at home. NVu web development software (which is GNU licensed) provides most of the features of DreamWeaver - why deal with Macromedia's arcane product activation when a comparable, and FREE cross-platform product is available? The same applies for using the GIMP instead of Adobe PhotoShop for graphics editing, and so on. Educators, consider the needs of your students, make life easier on your IT folks, and cut the strings to MicroSoft, Adobe/Macromedia, Apple, and the other proprietary behemoths! Explore the futurre of software licensing, and try open-source tools!

There are some excellent, classroom-tested open-source products available from this website via the LINKS page. We provide a number of tutorials on their use, but a simple web-search will turn up many more. Opinion by B. H. Giza, Ph.D., November 2005

GNU LICENSING

AN EXCERPT FROM THE GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991 Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA (online at: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed." "Preamble The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by the GNU Library General Public License instead.) You can apply it to your programs, too. When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things. To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it. For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights. We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software. Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors' reputations. Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all."

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Updated: April 6, 2006 © by B. H. Giza (bhgiza at educationtechnologies.com)