As we propel rapidly into the age of information, educational institutions find themselves transforming their students into life-time products and consumers of a small group of large corporations. For many, this as presented is dystopian, but they may not realize that it is happening presently as the public school system implants dependencies, veers from educational values, and needlessly spends a great amount of public funds doing so. Schools are teaching young impressionable students to use proprietary technology built by companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple. This reinforces toxic oligopolistic standards which the technology industry has founded itself upon for decades. These issues also thereby create unequal opportunities for success and freedom, subvert the privacy of both faculty and students, cost taxpaying citizens more than what is required for excellent education, and subverts the values which academia should possess. The public school system should be using free and open-source software and revert the mistakes its made in the advent of the emerging era.
Why should students studying in the public education system be subject to the desired workflows and software propagated by these large corporations? Why is it that rather than educating the future generation to subscribe to traditional academic values such as collaboration, trust, and betterment through the use and improvement of publicly developed open software, we are instead instructing them to become future consumers of products sold by the likes of Google and Microsoft? It is not not only unfair, but also unethical to continue allowing schools to be indoctrination grounds for the use of products such as Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows, Google Docs, and Google's Gmail. Data aggregator Datanyze has recorded that together Microsoft and Google control 99.91%1 of the office suite market share and if you include Apple, online statistics resource StatCounter has found that these companies control at least 95.84%2 of the consumer operating system market share. By using open-source software in schools we are allowing for not only freedom of thought and expression in the world of academia, but also a software market with more equal opportunities for competition as young adults enter the work force more willing to learn and use other software alternatives.
Some may argue that in order for members of society to become productive or successful they must cede to the woes of established companies and their technologies, but that is false. Most open source alternatives provide an equally if not more powerful suite of productivity tools, albeit in a less aesthetically pleasing manner. It is very easy to argue that a projects such as LibreOffice is just as good as Microsoft Office, or that the free operating system Linux is not only better, but also more information rich than Microsoft Windows. So why is it that we do not give students the ability to use free software which holds an equal value of efficiency? Future job opportunities for students may require proficiency in corporate products, however the skills learned in similar open-source alternatives are very much transferable or more informative. For example, frequent usage of any Linux-based operating system distribution allows and encourages the learning of basic command-line interface skills which are ubiquitously used in the technology industry by the likes of system administrators, application developers and data scientists. These skills are not as easily learned or encouraged when using Microsoft Windows. Contrarily, nearly all basic word processing, spreadsheet creation, and mathematical methods are shared between both proprietary applications and their open source alternatives. Schools should instead be focusing on knowledge acquisition and application rather than minor software quirks regardless.
Unlike that of corporations, the values of the free and open-source software community align very closely to core values of the education system and academia. The open-source model encourages honesty, trust, free access to information, and the sharing of knowledge through the available source code and transparency in development. Open-source software invites students to make community contributions and help pursue the betterment of not just the tools used for learning, but also themselves. As free software movement activist Richard Stallman said in his article on free software in schools, “Teaching the students to use free software, and to participate in the free software community, is a hands-on civics lesson.”3 When students are using proprietary software, there is no way to make meaningful contributions to assist their peers and community in efficiency and workflow. With open-source software, not just students, but also faculty and administration would have the ability to better their community and learning methods through publicly developed software. With a newly acquired ability for school boards, creators of curricula, and educators to modify, improve and tailor software for their specific needs and uses. Communities of educators would be better equipped to create new standards in education to better suit the needs of students for learning proficiently.
Proprietary software is a blatant violation of the privacy of both students and faculty. It is unfortunate that the public school system allows and thereby encourages corporations like Google to collect and store data on students who have no choice but to use the data-collecting software provided to them on school hardware. This also disproportionately affects students from less monetarily advantageous backgrounds, as they do not have expendable funds for personal hardware which they may use to circumvent forced use of proprietary software. With open-source software, students would have greater control over their own data. Most free software either has no data collection, or allows users to opt-in to data collection if they wish. Because of the transparent and distributed nature of open-source, it makes it very difficult for projects to collect data on users without them knowing. In her article on open-source software, digital security and privacy expert Harmonie Vo Viet Anh quite discernibly says “You can't have privacy without trust. You can't have trust without open source.”4
A future where free and open-source software is normalized through education is a future where the inequalities between students are dampened, leaving less at disadvantage. It is a future where parents can be assured their child's privacy is being protected. Where the cornerstones and fundamentals of a student's knowledge are put before their ability to use a product. Where community efforts make a positive impact on the quality of education. Where public funds are saved and can freely be allocated better use. A future where free and open-source software is normalized through education is a future that should be striven for.
1. Datanyze. “Office Suites Market Share Report: Competitor Analysis: G Suite, Office 365, HP OpenView.” Datanyze. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/office-suites--370.
2. “Operating System Market Share Worldwide.” StatCounter Global Stats. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-202112-202112-bar.
3. Stallman, Richard. “Why Schools Should Exclusively Use Free Software.” GNU Operating System. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-schools.html.
4. Vo Viet Anh, Harmonie. “Open Source: The Only Way to Restore Privacy ?” eye/o. Accessed January 1, 2022. https://eyeo.com/privacy_open_source/.