Re: [ossig] University curriculum for OSS?

[Colin Charles <byte@aeon.com.my>]

On Fri, 2003-07-25 at 15:36, Seah Hong Yee wrote:

> The first step I think is to have labs with of linux or FreeBSD workstation 
> and force student to do almost everything in that environment. from typing 
> paper to sending e-mails.  Students can play with windows at home when they 
> want to. In time, students will care less about the platform and more about 
> familiarity with the OS. This is after all, why windows is so popular. 

i believe for a computer science degree (or a software engineering one),
all labs are generally linux based, and they do everything (gcc, g++,
make, man, vi/emacs, etc...) on the box.

people still go home, hating linux :(

will they use it at home? nope. if they work from home, the telnet/ssh
into a machine at uni to get things done.

just my experience... i mean, i participate in organising linux install
days. out of maybe 900 students or more (in 1st-4th year), the most we'd
get that want linux at home would be in the range of about 12 pc's per
install fest. maybe the last time we had about 15... we got lucky!

giving talks on open source seem to garner about 40 students. will be
giving a talk entitled "the open source way of life" within the next two
weeks, i'll tell you how many students come to the talk and leave more
interested in OSS :)

if you ask me, forcing a student into using linux, and they telling you
that their microsoft .Net tools are heaps more powerful with an IDE
even, and thats what they'll use in their later lives as coders (and not
gcc and make), it makes things kind of hard. if a degree is a paper
chase, its surely a costly exercise - and the students want payback.

(painful truth, from someone that lives and breathes open source...)
-- 
Colin Charles, byte@aeon.com.my
http://www.bytebot.net/


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