The following is part of an open letter I wrote to an university committee that was surveying students and faculty on the feasibility and desirability of providing discounts to students for popular and expensive software packages. This discount would have been provided by basically sharing the cost among all students by purchasing a large number of licenses and then reselling them at a lower price to interested students. Obviously, I thought there was a better alternative.
To Software License Group members:
I agree that it is a noble cause to provide students with access to software at a cost that is commensurate with the resources of the average university student. However, with full-priced office suites and programs running as much as $300 to $700, even discounted software can be prohibitively expensive for this university’s students who are most in need of the discount. In the interest of accessibility, this program should be expanded beyond simple discounts.
It continually surprises and impresses me, in a good way. As a little background: I’ve used Linux at a moderate to advanced level for a few years now: I’ve never written a bash script longer than 6 lines and never hacked the kernel, but I’m not afraid of the command line and have no problems editing my xorg.conf, grub.conf or any other system files using nano. The command line is my friend, but I still like a GUI admin panel sometimes. I’ve totally switched to Linux as evidenced by the fact that the last copy of Microsoft office I purchased or used on my own computers was 2000.