Open Source Software in Education

To keep this article in context the author has been using a window laptop for about 30 years, A linux (kubuntu) computer for about 18 years and have been teaching students the use of Mac computers for about 12 years. My windows 11 laptop is my work horse but Linux is the only computer that does not annoy me and is the one that is the most trouble free.

For years, the base lines for teaching software in classes has been proprietary. Examples of these have been Windows and Adobe products such as photoshop. Licences for these software have been expensive. The onerous charges for schools or for students to buy for themselves was considered appropriate at the time. These times have changed with education suffering from cutbacks in most countries and the software creating elitism due to its expensiveness.
Open source software was considered the geek’s toys. Programs written by programmers for fun were simply to see if they could do it. Often these programs were unstable or difficult with many being operated from a command line.
Very early in the time of the computer, all software was open source; it was actually bundled with hardware so people could improve the programming or adapt it to their own purposes. Quite rapidly it was realised that proprietary companies not contained by any form of ethics other than profits could get free scripts to incorporate into their own closed products for greater profits and lower research costs. The era of the free software bundles diminished, and software started to get expensive.
According to Tozzi (2016) 1983 was a pivotal year when many companies started suing others for using their software or binary code in other products.
Then along came people like Richard Stallman, and Linus Torvalds with many others to work on the problem of sharing code and software. Their work on the development of open source copyrights has meant that people all over the world can contribute binary code and software to improve code and to not have their work stolen and incorporated into proprietary software that was often sold back to the public.
For many years open source was the arena of computer geeks and hackers who loved just testing the software and writing code. What is interesting is how so many people started getting together to improve software that was open source, leading to a steady growth and improvement of many applications.
Personal use of software such as GIMP and Linux based systems were fun to use but could never be taught in schools as they often crashed. Reliability was always problematic. This left schools who wanted to teach students for a computer technologically oriented world with proprietary software. These were very expensive options and in the earlier years the pirating of software and using it illegally in classrooms was the common answer to the problem. None of the big software companies had an educational package that was appropriate for the average small school. Microsoft had a reasonable package for licencing school computers but this could rapidly be a burden on any school. The limitations on schools inhibited the advancement of our students and stifled the students development, only those students that could afford the software on their home computers got the greater computer experience.

Now we jump to the last 4 years between 2015 and 2019. The open source software has gained a huge momentum, where once the proprietary software had the edge on reliability and in many cases usability; we now find open source taking the lead in new ideas.
In the early days, the big companies had most of the initiatives but that edge has started to diminish. The intellectual capacity of hundreds of thousands of people all over the world donating to open source products is leading towards exciting new ideas and developments.
It stands to reason that thousands of people working on a product will produce more ideas than a small team or programmers. The only real obstruction to advancement was a method to coordinate all these people and their ideas.
The next major step in the advancement of open source software was the advent of ‘GIT’, the free web based version control platform, that helps coordinate the open source software industry and the thousands of people adding to and fixing software.
According to Wikipedia (2019) Git was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 for development of the Linux kernel, ‘GIT’ being open source meant that anyone playing with software ideas could use this platform and invite others to join in with ideas and code. The software can be downloaded by anyone and used for all purposes other than selling for profit. The rapid expansion of GIT has mirrored the rapid expansion of opensource software.
Stack Exchange 2019 Web based version control.

Boshentz (edited Aug 22 2019 at 12:11) Stack Exchange. The March 2019 figures show the GIT segment representing 842,966 repositories (69% of total). To use GIT, the software must be open source.
In a modern school, the open source software cannot be ignored as according to Wikipedia (2019) many countries use Linux based systems and desktops to meet their main computing requirements. If Apache Red Hat servers are included in the data, most governments in the world have adopted open source software.

The advent of GIT and the expanding size of the open source community has seen exceptional development in this style of product and in the last 3 years, before 2020, the development of many products has seen support and funding to assist software development. This has led to tremendous progress in reliability useability and creativity of open source software. It is believed that GIMP and Blender are some of the best. There has also been some strong development and reliability advances in Kalligra, Krita, Oracle Virtual Box and the Open office suite.
The average schools teach and use a document creator of which Microsoft Word would be the dominant software in education. Apple Pages is also popular but many schools do not know of Open office which is a very viable alternative to the proprietary brands. LibreOffice Writer, WPS Writer, AbiWord, Scrivener, and Calligra Words, are all viable products that can replace propriety brands and have done so in many governments. Most of the previous software mentioned can be used for desktop publishing and for this process Scribus is also very good. I have avoided the online free versions as they typically do not have the functions compared to the desktop versions and are only practical when the quality of the internet is reliable. Note that with speed you get fast downloads but that does not equate to having a reliable connection for working. ‘Ping’ tests will determine speed and ‘traceroute’ tests will determine quality. When it come to the Adobe products, Gimp for photo editing is exceptionally good software. Many comparisons are made between Photoshop and Gimp but very few consider the plethora of add-ons available for GIMP. Gimp is far in excess of what most schools require and many professionals have turned to GIMP due to the exorbitant prices of Adobe products.
When it comes to movie editing, KdEnlive is an exceptionally good cross platform product. It is a multitrack editor with many options including motion tracking where the window will follow a point in your video. There are many more editors with most being made for Linux systems. A another high quality editor that is only for Linux is Cinelerra.
2D animation is covered by many products of which synfig is very good and certainly competes with Adobe professional. Krita is also free software that is improving rapidly. In the last months of 2019 Blender open source 2D and 3D editing has surpassed many other products with many considering it as the leader in the field. Blender also has a very good movie editor built in to support its 2D and 3D production capabilities. I have not even mentioned software like PyCharm, Moodle and the multitude of other software available for working in the computing area and teaching in science, maths, physics, and just about every area of learning.
To sum up, a Linux computer with its access to such a large range of free software and its reliability is a very viable education tool and should be strongly represented in every educational environment.
Many people will say the software is not as good as what they are using but from long years of experience what most people are saying is, they have not explored all the different ways of getting the most out of other software, that is they have not had the full experience with other computing platforms. Another issue is that many people will change their computer platform and then continue comparing their new computer with their old one as if the older computer is static and never gets upgraded.
Another prime resource that schools miss out on is the open source community. This online community is huge and is a prime reason to go fully into the open source arena. Many people when using free software, are happy to devote a little bit of their time and create how-to-do videos and webpages to help others learn. This community is a massive resource that many schools miss out on. To get an idea of the size of the online communities, go to YouTube and type ‘Blender armatures’. There are many people that have been willing to assist others by creating short videos or sets of videos to teach others how to get involved in some of the most creative software ever developed.
Brett Wilkin Nov 2019
Sa-nguan Ying School
Suphanburi

References
1) Boshentz (edited Aug 22 2019 at 12:11) Stack Exchange. are-there-any-statistics-that-show-the-popularity-of-git-versus-svn. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/136079/are-there-any-statistics-that-show-the-popularity-of-git-versus-svn Last accessed 21/11/2019

2) Christopher Tozzi (June 15, 2016) A Brief History of Free and Open Source Software Licensing https://www.channelfutures.com/open-source/a-brief-history-of-free-and-open-source-software-licensing Last accessed 21/11/2019

3) Kennedy. M. Dennis (2019) A Primer on Open Source Licensing Legal Issues: Copyright, Copyleft and Copyfuture http://www.cs.miami.edu/home/burt/learning/Csc322.052/docs/opensourcedmk.pdf Last accessed 6/11/2019

4) Wikipedia (last edited on 17 November 2019) List of Linux Adopters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters Last accessed 21/11/2019)

5) Wikipedia 2019 (GIT) GIT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git Last accessed 20/11/2019