The Real Issue with Free and Open Source Software

As much as I'd love to see more people using open source software, and I certainly encourage and even promote it, I fundamentally disagree with the notion of "using X because it's better". This decision needs to be made based on the merits of the technology on its own, not based on political or ideological views.

I've used Linux daily on my own personal machine for about 7~8 years now, and the only reason that continues to be true is because I find Linux superior to Windows for my particular use case. But someone focusing mostly on multi-media might disagree with this, since the ecosystem is much more mature on Windows and MacOS.

Believe me, I completely agree with this. I've said so myself:

And that might be fine for the casual user, but an educational institution needs to set a strong foundation for students to continue to grow afterwards. Using the wrong tools to lay that foundation is doing them a disservice.

Note that I'm not necessarily talking about preparing students for the workforce. To give an example of this: Godot is one very popular open source game engine. But it's not the industry standard. And yet, the concepts are very much interchangeable with other industry standard engines. And since it's not uncommon for studios to come up with their own internal engines from time to time, it may actually play in to the strengths of the student to learn general concepts rather than specific tooling.
Plus, Godot is actually so popular that a student can continue learning on their own well past their graduation, because of the amount of material online, and plenty of people to reach out to.

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