Adopting Free And Open Source Software(Foss) In Education
i-manager’s Journal on Educational Psychology · 2018
The development, advancement, and innovations in Information Technology have given rise to new opportunities for learning, understanding, new ways of learning, and easy accessibility with reduction in cost. Unfortunately, majority of learning tools, software, and materials were cost effective, specifically for developing countries within proprietary systems. The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) aims to break these barriers. According to Free Software Foundation (2009), Free software means that the software's users have freedom (The issue is not about price) to use them. It encourages and enables free sharing of softwares and their distribution to serve the community. FOSS has become popular due to its affordability and the freedom it provides and hence it has begun to get noticed by many governments around the world, and many initiatives have been launched to reap its benefits. The benefits of FOSS is not only utilizing the software for free, but also sharing of resources, fast repair of the code, high code quality, utilizing the shared resources for the development and maintenance, and empowering the end users to gain all the benefits of using the shared software. The adopters of FOSS also have the opportunity to localise the software to suit local people. For example, in India Open Office has been localised, that is translated to support twenty-six Indian languages, while Microsoft Office can support only twelve (E-governance India blog, 2007). This phenomenon is especially useful and can be adopted in other countries too to increase its citizen's access to ICT. The use of FOSS (i.e. Ubuntu, LibreOffice) will help the students to share, participate, modify, and assist in the development of software for the local market and community (Makhathe and Mabanza, 2013) . Since the code is accessible, it assists the students not to re-invent the wheel, but to modify and improve the software