Open Source Software

Open Source Software offers a great benefit to individuals, schools, and other institutions. You can have software without paying the license fee and install the application. You can modify and add new features to the software and can even share it with others. Yes! We can make the most out of it. We can use applications free with little effort from us.

With all these good stuffs, the school could save money and use it for other essentials. Open Source Software will provide the needs of the schools and students, enabling them to practice in the core of technological aspect, and that will improve the performance and learning.

Many schools have been taking part of this and our school should be one of those. The school could have a program or create an organization and if I were to suggest I would name it “OSS Enthusiast” that would remind students the current emerging softwares and could give a copy of those or let them search. The school could give the students a project that utilizes a particular application. There should also fun activities in school that would stimulate students’ participation and would encourage them to use those applications with their specific functions. Activities that would encourage the students to modify, improve, and create applications. All these would boost the students’ knowledge and would help in finding out their potentials.

With all these great ideas, applications could be developed and new technical concepts and tools could emerge.

The following URL’s taught me and be convinced how great an Open Source Software is:

• http://dragon.ep.usm.edu/~yuen/blog/2007/09/open-source-refers-to-software-programs.html

• http://www.opensourceconsortium.org/publicdocs/oss_in_schools.pdf

• http://edge-op.org/grouch/schools.html