Published at LXer:

This year, my sixth grader was issued a laptop computer by our school district. Much to my chagrin, my daughter brought home a shiny new white MacBook. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Mac user myself, but I make that choice knowing all of the pitfalls and risks associated with purchasing from the big Apple. Some might think that I’m biased against the Linux desktop, but that’s not true. There is a time and a place for proprietary systems, and a time and place for open source, and our American public education system is perfect for open source. What I didn’t expect was for our rural school district to fork over one million of our tax-payer dollars for these MacBooks, when the better, and more economical, choice would be to issue netbooks running Linux.

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