[ale] teaching opportunity

[George Carless]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 08:30:14AM -0400, Armsby John-G16665 wrote:
> I believe we have effectively run off the teacher lady...... I say we give the job
> to the senior in high school.

Unfortunately, while I understand the rationale behind the responses that she was 
given, I think that this list came across as rather arrogant and overbearing.  
Result: another person put off running Linux, and upset by the Linux community.  
There might well be good reasons for running the course on a Windows platform - say, 
because the training centre wasn't currently geared up for running Linux, or because 
some element of what they have in place for training currently requires Linux 
software.  Either way, it can be useful to move people towards free software - PHP, 
MySQL, etc. - on a gradual basis, and it's not necessarily essential or even 
advisable to introduce people to these things on a platform that is alien to them.  
And I would suggest that the individual was likely looking for an instructor to set 
at least part of the curriculum, so while the description of the course may have been 
ambitious and perhaps inaccurate, this was hardly a reason for an all-out offensive.

In short, I think that some of you have simply succeeded in coming across as rather 
immature elitists who would prefer an argument to a constructive effort to actually 
move people over to using free software.  Ms. Bell repeatedly indicated that further 
discussion could take place off-list with any interested parties, and I honestly 
cannot blame her if she didn't want to get embroiled in a flamewar on some frankly 
rather pedantic points.

--George
--------------------------------------
George Carless ... kafka at antichri.st
Words are just dust in deserts of sound