Free and Open Source Software in Education

Abstract

Free and open source software use is on the rise in public schools in the United States. Beginning in the 1980s and the advent of the personal computer, schools across America have been large-scale consumers of educational software. Much of the software used in schools continues to be proprietary software that schools must pay to license from vendors. The Free Software Foundation began to advocate for free software in all areas of life—school, home and work. In the 1990s, the arrival of the World Wide Web changed the educational software dynamic, with more schools opting to use free Web-based applications. At the beginning of the 21st century, in addition to Web-based educational tools and proprietary software, educators can choose from free and open source software and free operating systems. Some large-scale projects to educate the developing world, such as the One Laptop Per Child initiative, rely entirely on free software because it can be easily and legally modified to suit local and individual pedagogical needs. This article discusses the role of free software running on personal computers and looks at the ways in which it presents a challenge to the prevailing ways in which students interact with technology and schools maintain their information technology.

Overview

During the final decades of the twentieth century, Americans witnessed a technological revolution. A century that began with automobiles and airplanes ended with personal computers and the World Wide Web. Experts continue to debate whether the personal computer or the Internet was the most important invention of the end of the century, but there can be little doubt that both technologies have worked together to radically alter the ways in which people work and play.

What is Free Software? As defined by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the leading advocate for free software around the world, free software must meet certain criteria. Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom for the users of the software:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this (Free Software Foundation, 2007).

Free software includes virtually all the software written for the free Linux operating system, a competitor to Microsoft's Windows and Apple's OSX operating systems. Some well-known free software includes the Firefox Web browser, Sun's Open Office office suite, and the sound editor Audacity. Another distinguishing mark of free software is that it is cross-platform, meaning that it can run on all the major operating systems—including Linux, Apple's OSX, and the various versions of Windows. Many in the media refer to free software as open source software to highlight the fact that its source code is available to all.

Free vs. Free. The FSF makes the helpful distinction between software that is free (as in freedom, defined above) and free (i.e., does not cost money) software (Free Software Foundation, 2007). Free (as in no cost) software does not come with one or more of the four software freedoms outlined above—most importantly, its source code is unable to be modified by the user. While the user does not pay for the software or for licensing, this type of free software does not fit the above criteria for free (as in freedom) software. Some well-known examples of this type of free software include Google Earth, Google Maps, and the Opera Web browser.

Both types of free software, commonly known by the acronym FOSS (for free and open-source software), are to be distinguished from commercial software programs, such as Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop, which must be purchased or licensed before they can legally be used by individuals, schools, or corporations.

Brief History of Free Software. Free software was commonplace for the first decades of the computer era, beginning in the 1950s. As computers became more advanced, and corporations began investing large sums of money into developing software for the burgeoning enterprise, school and home software markets, they began to place restrictions on the use, modification, and distribution of their software. Virtually all the software sold in the United States today is what is known as proprietary (or closed-source) software.

In the 1980s, Richard Stallman, an IT industry veteran, became alarmed at the trend toward proprietary software, and in 1984 be founded the FSF to advocate on behalf of free software. The FSF has helped free software to earn pride of place on the servers running in many government and commercial data centers. Today many well-known websites, such as Amazon.com (Shankland, 2004) and Google (Delio, 2002) run on free software operating systems, specifically Linux and BSD.

On the desktop side, free software has made far fewer inroads. Linux and BSD continue to have a small segment of the overall operating system market, which the proprietary Microsoft Windows continues to dominate. As for the applications that run on a given operating system, most continue to be written only for Windows, or only for Windows and Apple.

Computers & Software in the Schools. With the growing user base for the Apple II in the 1980s, as well as the introduction of increasingly powerful PCs running increasingly powerful incarnations of Microsoft's Windows operating system, proprietary software developers began to see a myriad of business opportunities in three different markets: business, home, and education.

Many schools in the United States—like businesses and home users—have used proprietary software since the use of personal computers became widespread in the 1980s. This software has been used by administrators to manage school budgets, teachers who instruct students, and by the students themselves to learn computer skills and complete assignments.

As the business world put away typewriters and adopted the personal computer on a grand scale in the early 1980s, education leaders began to advocate for its use in schools. Their logic was simple: students should learn computer skills in schools so that they will not be left behind when they enter the job market. When the competitive dust had settled, Apple was the most successful in getting its more beginner-friendly computers (complete with a graphical user interface) into elementary schools, while other PC manufacturers such as IBM captured the majority of the high school market. As late as 1995, five years after the Apple II was discontinued, it still accounted for nearly 38 percent of all school computers (Flynn, 1995).

Beginning in earnest in the early 1980s, a wide variety of educational software became available for home and school use. Reading and math software was especially prominent in elementary schools, while typing tutors and office applications (such as word processors and spreadsheets) were fixtures in middle and high school computer labs. Software titles such as Reader Rabbit, Where In the World is Carmen San Diego?, and Oregon Trail became fixtures in elementary school classrooms.

The accepted wisdom was that educational software was helping both to modernize the American educational system and to make quality education more widely accessible. As a report from ABC News notes, "Almost every school district in the country has bought computer software that's supposed to help kids do better in math or reading" (ABC News, 2007).

In the early 1990s, a new phenomenon known as the World Wide Web began to transform the educational software industry, making it Web-based rather than simply computer-based. Using the Internet, students were able to tap into a global community of teachers and learners to expand their educational horizons. And teachers began to join together across the globe to share resources and advice.

Throughout the 1990s the reach of the Web quickly expanded—some would say exploded—across the educational landscape: while only 35 percent of public schools were wired in 1994, the number climbed to nearly 100 percent by 2001 (Wells & Lewis, 2006, p. 4). Moreover, the ratio of students to Internet-enabled computers dropped from 12.1 to 1 in 1998 to 3.8 to 1 in 2005, meaning that more and more students had easier access to the Internet at school (Wells & Lewis, 2006, p. 6). Fast broadband connections provided quicker access to Web-based information: only 3 percent of wired schools were using slower dial-up technology by 2005 (Wells & Lewis, 2006, p. 6).

Free Software in Education Today. The trends paint a clear picture of wired teachers and wired students. While there continues to be a market for educational software, more and more schools are supplementing or even replacing traditional educational software with Web-based learning tools that run in any modern Web browser—including Mozilla Firefox. Indeed, a modern Web browser like Firefox can run on top of an operating system, such as Linux, which itself is free software.

Additionally, there are an increasing number of free (as in no cost) Web-based applications, such as Google Docs, that can act as basic replacements for licensed commercial software such as Microsoft Word. Web-based applications are not installed on school computers or servers, but can be accessed by anyone with an Internet account and the right passwords. For example, Google Docs, which is an online word processor, is being used in high school journalism classes ("Google Docs," n.d.), while another school is tracking student progress in reading through Google Spreadsheets (Lauer, 2006). Google for Educators is a site operated by Google to encourage educators to use the company's free online tools in the classroom.

Despite the inroads made by Web-based applications, schools continue to use software—most of it proprietary—for a number of pedagogical, financial, and even political reasons. Teachers and administrators use such software to help with lesson planning, student information tracking, and special education, but the two main categories of software that students continue to use on a daily or weekly basis are:

• Office software: Students from elementary school to high school use word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software to complete their assignments
• Graphics software: Students design such items as newsletters and photo albums as part of the schools' push toward multisensory outputs.

Producers of this proprietary educational software require school districts who want to use their software to purchase it, and then they charge for support, upgrades, and other enhancements.

Why Use Free & Open Source Software (FOSS)? In contrast to proprietary software, which involves strict licensing on usage and the additional costs of upgrades, FOSS is free (as in freedom) and can be used on multiple computers or servers at no cost. This includes both the operating system (such as Linux) and the software that runs on top of the operating system. FOSS software comes either with low-cost support options from the software vendor, or free support through online community forums.

Where schools are concerned, a significant advantage to FOSS educational software is that it typically runs on less-powerful computer hardware than proprietary software, which reduces or even eliminates the need for cash-strapped school districts to upgrade their existing equipment, so those resources can be spent elsewhere. Most industry experts agree that FOSS is finding greater acceptance in education, primarily because of dwindling budgets coupled with the persistent need to provide the best educational resources available (Hoover, 2007, "Open Source Gains Ground").

FOSS is also a valuable teaching tool for students who will be entering a workforce dominated by information technology. Some educators believe that this dawn of the networked age will require creative thinkers who are encouraged to tinker with technology to make it work better. Vessels (2007), for example, illustrates the constraining nature of proprietary, licensed software:

"We are well into the beginnings of the Information Age. It stands to affect the people of the world at least as profoundly as the Industrial Age. It is time for the opening of the tools that will be needed to build this new age. Teaching our children to be passive purchasers of closed, proprietary solutions to problems is not enough. Constraining students to move the mouse within the confines of the instruction set of a few closed, proprietary programs merely cages those students and constrains our future." Students should, at least, be given the opportunity to see how their new tools work. They should be given the opportunity to examine the inner workings of software. They should be given the opportunity to extend the functions of their tools, where they see or imagine possibilities. They should not be held back by locking the toolbox of the Information Age and told they must not peer inside, must not try to discover how it works, must not share their tools with others, must not use their tools without paying proper tribute to the software overlords, under penalty and punishment of law (Vessels, 2007, par. 3-4).

There is a growing list of free educational software available for the free software operating system known as Linux, and groups such as the Organization for Free Software in Education and Teaching and the Free Software Foundation's Free Software in Education project are helping to raise awareness of alternatives to proprietary educational software programs. Websites such as SchoolForge provide news and other resources to educators using (or considering the use of) FOSS in educational contexts.

Further Insights

One Laptop Per Child. A new delivery method for educational software is the low-cost PC. Primarily aimed at the developing world, the One Laptop Per Child PC (OLPC or XO) is an inexpensive laptop computer with wireless Internet access that runs free software, especially free educational software.

OLPC runs a version of Linux, which has fewer system (CPU and memory) requirements than Microsoft Windows or Macintosh OSX. It is designed to provide a complete suite of educational tools:

"There's a word processor, Web browser, calculator, PDF textbook reader, some games … three music programs, a painting application, a chat program and so on. The camera module permits teachers, for the first time, to send messages home to illiterate parents. There are also three programming environments of different degrees of sophistication. Incredibly, one keystroke reveals the underlying code of almost any XO program or any Web page. Students can not only study how their favorite programs have been written, but even experiment by making changes. (If they make a mess of things, they can restore the original)" (Pogue, 2007, p. 2).

From the beginning, MIT's Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the One Laptop Per Child project, has defined it as an educational project, not a computer project. The laptop is designed to harness the power of free software in education.

Not all are happy with XO's free software model. In a move that created considerable controversy, Microsoft has pushed to have the specifications of the One Laptop Per Child PC enhanced—and thus the price raised—so the machine can run a version of its more resource-hungry and proprietary Microsoft XP operating system (Utzschneider, 2007). Microsoft Windows already runs on an OLPC competitor, Intel's Classmate PC.

Free Software Alternatives to Commercial Software. According to the Website Open Source Alternative, which lists free software alternatives to proprietary applications, virtually every piece of commercial software commonly used in schools has a free software alternative. Some of this free software runs on top of existing Windows or Macintosh operating systems, while other free software runs only on the free Linux operating system. Below is a representative sample:

Viewpoints

Is Free Software the Answer in Education? As is the case with home and business users, those who use free software in education are divided between those who simply want free software due to its lower price or better features, and those who want free (as in freedom) software on the principle that software should be free to use and modify as the end user sees fit. Further complicating matters, some who use free software are not opposed to using it on a non-free operating system, such as Windows or Mac OSX, while others use it only on free operating systems such as Linux or BSD.

There are also pragmatists who warm to the idea of using free software in education, though not exclusively. One such pragmatist is Kathryn Moyle, an associate professor of educational technology at the University of Canberra in Australia. In an interview in LinuxWorld, she explained:

"I'm not advocating a complete replacement [of proprietary software with free software], but I am advocating that it should be included into any teaching and learning that is about software. I think that proprietary software has a role. To suggest that we need to get rid of all proprietary software out of schools would be both politically impossible, and also unrealistic about what students are going to face.

I think there is a role for proprietary software, but I do think that we are doing our students a disservice if we don't expose them to learning about open source software; both in terms of its philosophical underpinnings and the communities of practice that sit behind the developing of open source software, but also from a straight user point of view that there are alternatives to proprietary software" (Tay, 2007, p. 2).

Moyle argues that some of the legacy applications students will use in the workplace will be proprietary, and not to train them on that software would harm students' future employment prospects. Others argue that if students leave school trained in various open source applications, it will be easier for employers to adopt that software in their business operations (Tay, 2007).

Terms & Concepts

Closed-Source Software: Software for which the source code cannot legally me modified. Closed-source software vendors do not make the source code available to the general public.

Educational Software: Software--including games, typing tutors, reading assistants, office suites, graphics application, and the like--that is used within a school environment.

Free Software: Software that can be downloaded, used, and redistributed without compensating those who created the software. Its source code is also made freely available, and users can legally create derivative works. Also refers to another type of free software --closed-source software that is free for users to download, use, and redistribute without compensating those who created the software. However, the source code is not exposed to end users.

One Laptop Per Child: A project initiated by MIT's Nicholas Negroponte in 2005 that aims to provide all children in the developing world with inexpensive, Internet-enabled laptops for use in education. The ultimate goal of the project is to close the so-called "digital divide" between children in developed and developing countries.

Open-Source Software: Software that can be downloaded, used, and redistributed without compensating those who created the software. Its source code is also made freely available, and users can legally create derivative works. It is another way to refer to free (as in freedom) software.

Operating System: A set of digital instructions ready by a computer's hardware to perform operations on a computer, such as the display of a graphical user interface.

Proprietary Software: Often used synonymously with closed-source software, the term in common parlance refers to software that contains privately held software code and requires payment to the software vendor for use.

World Wide Web: A collection of linked documents in hypertext form that are utilized on the Internet using a piece of software called a Web browser.

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