But does this mean I can't have iTunes anymore?

Library Computer Guy and I have been having a good conversation about open source software. It's been on my mind a lot recently. This story caught my attention this week, though the document it refers to has been around for a while. I signed it and suggest you do to.

A few months ago, I installed Ubuntu Linux my laptop with fantastic results. Everything, including the built-in wireless network card, worked perfectly with the new OS. Inspired, I took an old ThinkPad 1200 (64 MB RAM) that had been handed down to my kids by their uncle and which was basically inoperable, and revived it with a special lightweight installation of Xubuntu. An ugly paperweight was converted into a useful computer again. It is obviously still limited in what it can do, but my son can use it to check his email and do basic schoolwork tasks, even writing and creating slideshows with OpenOffice.

Now, I had decided to try Linux myself simply because I had become fed up with how poorly Windows XP was working for me. The last straw was when I was forced to pay for an upgrade from Microsoft Money 2004 to 2007 because certain online banking features just quit working in the 2004 version, as I learned, because they were no longer supported. When I started having the same types of errors in the 2007 version, I screamed (literally), "Enough is enough!" and set about plotting to overthrow Windows World, at least the little outpost of it that existed within the four walls of my home.

Little did it occur to me then that the decision I was making had real political, philosophical and environmental implications.

In my household, I met the most resistance from my 13-year-old daughter, an eighth-grader. She did not object when I installed a Linux OS on her computer, which had become nearly as slow as the old ThinkPad, but soon began to miss certain things being in the same place they were before and worrying (not unreasonably) that the open source programs would not be compatible with work she might do in the Windows/Office-based lab at her school. She began to lobby hard for me to put Windows back. Some interested parties think I am a mean and cruel dad for refusing (thus far) to do so.

But last June, just as this conflict was starting to rear its head, I came across a great article* which really helped me to articulate the reasons I wanted to hold the line, and also began to open my eyes to a side of open source I had not considered. The author, Jay Pfaffman, seemed to anticipate most of the arguments that were raised against my forcing my child to learn something other than Windows and Microsoft Office applications: that free software must not be as good, that kids need to learn the programs everyone is using, etc. But mainly he raised serious and excellent questions about whether it is good for schools (and libraries, I thought) to depend so heavily on proprietary software.

See, if all the library and school labs and training curricula are built around Windows and Office, then most people will only ever know Windows and Office, thus ensuring a perpetual market for newer versions of Windows and Office. Just as I was forced to do with Money, when the next version comes along, you will have to buy it or effectively lose the ability to use what you have already bought.

I want my daughter to have real computer skills when she enters the workplace: Not just a working knowledge of one suite of programs, but the ability to figure out for herself how things work; the ability to adapt to whatever system is in place wherever she goes.

*at the time, freely available, now behind Springer's paywall at Tech Trends.