Students need to ditch proprietary operating systems and software

[Gregory Gay]

Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace. This is a bug, which Ubuntu is designed to fix. We need to make Ubuntu easily usable and easily available to new LCSEE students.

Non-free software is holding back innovation in the IT industry, restricting access to IT to a small part of the world's population and limiting the ability of software developers to reach their full potential, globally. This bug is widely evident in the PC industry.
  Steps to repeat:
    1. Visit a local PC store.
  What happens:
    2. Observe that a majority of PCs for sale have non-free software pre-installed.
    3. Observe very few PCs with Ubuntu and free software pre-installed.
  What should happen:
    1. A majority of the PCs for sale should include only free software like Ubuntu.
    2. Ubuntu should be marketed in a way such that its amazing features and benefits would be apparent and known by all.
    3. The system shall become more and more user friendly as time passes.
 What we need to do:
    1. Make a customized Ubuntu distribution with education and ease-of-use in mind.
    2. Distribute this distribution as a VMWare image (or for another virtualization program)
    3. Ask all new students to load this image on their home computer.

Over time, they will hopefully abandon the world of proprietary software and embrace open-source alternatives.