Educating kids in schools that use only proprietary software will prevent many talented young people from really understanding IT. Schools should give children and young people access to software that they can study, investigate, modify and improve. GNU/Linux is really their (and our) only hope - it makes early educational experience with real systems possible.

I'm with Diana Artemis on this. Access to free (as in freedom), open systems and tools will vastly improve education in this field at the young influential ages.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Even within IT departments it's hard to find many people who really understand, or want to understand, how think work -- and for that I blame Microsoft and it's Microsoft technicians. A good grounding in IT using free software wouldn't be much of a setback to an MCSE, but learning just Microsoft means that you're not learning real IT just how to use MS wizards.

Too true. Sputnik was a satellite, the R-7 (or SS-6 if you're NATO) that put it up was a missile.

But I got that from Wikipedia, so it's equally possible that the R-7 was actually a type of spiced sausage with a back catalogue of successful pop songs and a long career as a professional golfer behind it........

Why restrict kids to only learning *nix systems ? That's like restricting them to one programming language rather than teaching the fundamentals of good and bad programming, which can be applied to anything.

Also, if Windows is the most likely vector for a cyber-attack, surely that's the system that should be studied most closely ? Visual Studio Express is free (as in beer).

No-one is suggesting that *only* OSS is used in schools and education, but that it *should be* used. The fact is that the opposite is largely the case at the moment: *only* propietary software is used.

And the point Diana Artemis made (if you had actually bothered to read what she wrote) was that free (as in freedom) software can be examined, modified and improved by students so they learn, as opposed to M$ free (yeah we'll let you download it and use it in strictly defined ways and if you do something we don't like we'll see you in court) software.

As for your point about using software that is most commonly subject to attack, that is a red herring in this case: for students it is more important to learn *why* a bit of software is crap, not just that it *is* crap.