Re: [edu-eu] Talking points for FLOS Software at universities

[Aleix Pol]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 11:25 PM, Thomas Thym <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi everyone,

yesterday I was invited to a panel discussion at the University Basel, Switzerland (representing the business world and open source communities). After the discussion I was asked by a research assistant if I know some good arguments to convince her professor to support open source software instead of propreterian. I searched the web and found some points. Do you know a good link to a good source or perhaps a scientific paper?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Cheers,
Thomas

P.S.: The arguments I found so far:

* Open source software was born at universities.
* For the world wide scientific community it is more efficient to work together on software instead of each buying software by (perhaps different) companies reinventing the wheel.
* Power to modify and extend the software to the specific needs.
* Encourages the international cooperation between different universities using and supporting the same free software.
* ...

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Hi Thomas,

I'd say the best point on Free Software in education is that you're putting your effort in learning a technology that belongs to you regardless to what situation is going to present to you. (probably needs to be rephrased)

When speaking about teaching Free Software, it's important to note also that most (about 80%) of the proprietary software include free software in some way. I'd guess that's more of a point to teach opensource in CS universities, though.

Hope that helps!

Aleix