On Thursday 21 December 2006 17:35, Shakthi Kannan wrote: > > *nix are harder > > to setup and those setup shows more problems so > > people avoid it. > GNU/Linux installations have been made > "newbie-friendly" these days.
It is perception. And the so called friendly distro. are not yet available enough as much as pirated windows CDs are. RedHat 7.2 and 9.0 are still in circulation in some of the colleges. I offered them ubuntu and slackware CDs but it was a chicken and egg problem. Prof didn't see an advantage of upgrading and students weren't ready to take anything that college is not using. And I wasn't patient enough to persue across academic years to make sure that they get upgrades. > > Problem is working on unix has no advantage in > > college. > > Incorrect. Most CS education in US is on *nix or > GNU/Linux. FOSS-based education is ideal for Indian > universities/colleges. Implementation has to be done > correctly. CS education in US is not the frame of reference and you can find plenty of rant online about CS students starting with java/visual basic instead of C/C++ these days. > > Nobody knows it, > > nobody asks for it. So the motivation is way too > > low.. > > That is why in my workshops I give an industry > exposure to the students on how FOSS is extensively > used in the Industry - which they have no idea about > in the first place. Well. That is another problem not as apparent as much of availability of FOSS within educational institutes. I believe, from experience, that one has to have a drive to learn in order to truly succeed/benefit from FOSS. Well, actually it is true for everything but everything else has a ecosystem which supports jobs/earning even when you don't/may not have a drive learn and advance. With FOSS, that ecosystem is absent and it is guaranteed that it would remain that way. In that case, when somebody asks you, "will I get job if I learn linux", it is very hard to craft a "yes" to it. The question is wrong on so many levels, it is not even funny. > > Wooing > > away profs/educational institutes is a hard way of > > doing things. > > One can criticize, but, at the same time, one must do > something to improve themselves. Most Indians in India > that I have seen only criticize, and don't do any > *productive* work - be it for the beneficial for > others or for their own good. Please don't generalize. I did offer an alternative which is to video shoot the lectures and distribute them freely. I did some workshops/lectures for PLUG and frankly it is tiring to answer same questions over and over again and with academia, you have to play the same game once new academic years started. I have no interest and more importantly energy doing that. OTOH, if you shoot and distribute, I-the-lecturer is doing one time job which is OK and given that nothing much changes in 3-4 years in academia, it is acceptable too. I am ready to redo the lectures if people are interested. I have handicam which could be sufficient. Any takers? Shridhar -- ______________________________________________________________________ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List: (plug-mail@plug.org.in) List Information: http://plug.org.in/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/plug-mail Send 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] for mailing instructions.
