If you have been following the news last week, you may have stumbled upon a quite shocking news item. A teacher from Austin, Texas confiscated a bunch of CDs containing free Linux distributions from a student who was demonstarting GNU/Linux on his laptop and handing out the CDs. After this, the teacher sent an angry email to Ken Starks of the HeliOS Project, where the student got his Linux CDs from.

“This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older version of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them…”

Yes, the teacher is clearly a person who doesn’t know a lot about FOSS and the comment sections of every site that published the snippet exploded with comments such as:

“If the teacher is reading this…… you should be fired. Imagine if that same attitude was taken during the women’s rights movement. Basically, the equivalent comment would be, “do not teach women about science, math, or business because its not preparing them for the real world.”

Its people like this that encourage me to homeschool my children. As Helen Lovejoy would say, “Won’t somebody please think of the children!?”"

I believe the comments were a bit too harsh. As Ken Stark admitted after a few days, he never meant to attack anyone personally. Now the teacher is in quite some trouble, because the news was published in the local newspaper and of course on numerous sites on the Internet.

In my opinion, what the teacher did wrong was being too aggressive and not doing enough research before sending the email. The teacher’s mistake was threatening the HeliOS project, because she didn’t know there is such a thing as Free licenses, especially the GPL and along with that a mountain of powerful open source software. In addition, the teacher based her opinion on the bad experience she had with Linux in college. We all know, of course, how much the OS has changed and improved since then.

However, judging this is too much:
“I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows.”

Obviously, she planned on doing some research. Isn’t that actually a good thing? I don’t really know what would happen (the teacher had a talk with her superior, I think and now the CDs have been returned) if Ken Starks didn’t respond so emotionally, but research would surely lead her to realise Linux is a great, legal operating system which people can and should use, especially students. The thing would end well (even though yes, it was the teacher’s email who caused the whole commotion) without the ruckus. Luckily, Ken Stark did a great follow-up post, commenting how she actually is a good teacher and that we all have to handle stuff like this more maturely in the future.

See, all of this brings me to my point. The type of ignorant people we saw here could hypothetically be a good thing for Linux adoption - the type of people which loudly express their bad opinion about Linux. Their “shouting” gives us a chance to respond as a community with even more power, while attracting many people due to the commotion the first negative comments started. It actually promotes Linux to those people, who realise Linux always wins in these cases, especially theses famous “School teacher says this and that about Linux” headlines. Such “enemies” can only help.

What do you think?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Austin teacher threatens to sic cops on Linux group because “No software is free”
• Epilogue: Austin schoolteacher who didn’t believe Linux existed