An advocate of free software, Ken Starks, yesterday posted on his blog a communication he had received from a teacher at a middle school that is part of the Austin Independent Schools District. In the communication, the teacher wrote, No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful … the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods.
Not only is this factually inaccurate, it is offensive to an entire community: the free software community, which echoes some if not all of Starks’s claims about the benefits of free software. That community spans a broad spectrum of people including consumers, corporate employees, hobbyists, activists, entrepreneurs. Are all those people, when they say, With free software, you can do things that you can’t do with proprietary software,
lying or making gross over-statements? No, they are not, and there is an extensive body of legal opinion and factual evidence to confirm this.
There is some discussion of the incident over on the debian-user mailing list.
It looks like there’s a happy ending to this, at time of writing. After talking more with the teacher, Ken Starks has been able to conclude that she
Let’s hope that she will now be less inclined to denigrate the efforts of the free software community, and more inclined to join that community.