[Fsf-friends] The basic problems

[sooraj]

The main reason for the growth of free s/w in india may be the 
large amount of advertisement and support for proprietery s/ given 
by local Computer centers and educational institutions. Away from 
big cities, (I don't know what are the current circumstances 
outside kerala), no computer institute tries to teach free s/w. 
Instead they give large amount of advertisement for Office,Vb, VC, 
ASP, Oracle etc.
The reason is that the institutes wants profit and they think that 
they can get a high profit only through teaching MS products. They 
make general public feel that A computer means windows (What a 
funny idea isn't it?) Even i have some experience with some 
employees in some computerised environment unknowing about free 
s/w at all.
There is the deficiency of good faculties as well. Even those 
people running Computer centeres (We can call them principals or 
centre heads of an eucational institution) unawre of the fact that 
there are free s/w available instead of what s/w they use.
Also anybody has a comment about teaching programming in high 
school classes before the student understands what is a computer, 
what is word processing, what is a spread sheet? what is internet 
etc..
Our educational policy is to first teach programming and may of 
our schools are without proper facilities.. The student who sees 
the computer for the first time in his life starts learning 
programming in c++ and he is really confused (that was the case 
with me when i started programming some years back).. So i think 
its appropriate to teach some fundamentals and some lab sessions 
at least for 2-3 months.. Any opinion about it.. then plz write to 
me
thank U