Hi, This is something interesting. The government of Peru has passed a law, or is in the proces, for the use of free software only in government agencies. Microsoft Peru wrote a letter to the Peru Government against this. A strong reply was sent to Microsoft Peru The Peruvian Government's letter is particularly interesting and very strong in its criticism of proprietary software. When Peru can do it, we can atleast get the Indian education agencies to support Linux by adopting Open Standards software. We can get them to include standardized open standards languages like C/C++, (that gets Visual Basic to the dust-bin), and also formulate syllabus for lower classes without any proprietary component. Most schools today use MS Office, or Visual Basic etc. In fact they actually specify the softwares, paintbrush, notepad, etc. Thats wrong. We should try to develop a curriculum which is platform independent right from Class - 1 to Class 12. It is not a good idea just to focus on higher classes and leave the beginning to the whims and fancies of the schools and book authors. Actually the class 11-12 syllabus is generally platform independent. But the lower classes syllabus formulation is not standardised but left to the schools probably (this is my thinking). Classes 1-5 could have general editors with Platform independent formats like RTF so that it is not OS dependent, spreadsheets, games (without any particular game being specified), simple languages like Logo, Basic etc. Students above 5th could start languages like HTML, Perl etc., which would be simple. And above 9th, emphasis on languages such as C/C++; open standards databases with simple SQL support, simple Graphics etc. <<Linux_n_Peru.zip>> Regards, Venky Note : Huge text, hence I have saved it in RTF and zipped it. Only one file, the RTF has the law, its history, Microsoft Peru's letter and the subsequent reply.
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Linux_n_Peru.zip
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