What to tell 13 year old kids about Linux and Open Source?

[Nadav Har'El]

There have been some very good ideas in this thread (and I'm collecting them
to use on my daughter when she's a little older ;-)), and I just wanted to
add my two cents:

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011, Alex Shnitman wrote about "Re: What to tell 13 year old kids about Linux and Open Source?":
> Come on, guys, kids don't give a rat's ass about what's legal and what
> isn't. Even many adults don't. Those arguments may work in corporations, but
> certainly not in a school. Same thing about vendor lock-in: you're talking
> in adult terms here, they know nothing about it and they don't care.

I agree. But it's not exactly that kids don't care what is illegal and what
isn't - (most of) the same 13-year-old kids will not be shoplifting, or
stealing from friends, for example - but when kids see that the *norms* are
different from the *written laws*, they tend to accept the former (if they
even know the latter). When a kid sees all kids around him are copying
software, and no adult is doing anything to actively stop it, he learns that
it is acceptable.

> The first thing I'd stress is customizability, as Mordechay has excellently
> mentioned. "Imagine that you write code that is then used by millions of
> people all over the world." That kind of thing talks to kids. The second
> thing is the community aspect: you can enter chat rooms / forums and get
> help for the software you use. And if you wrote something or became an
> expert in something, people will come to you for advice. That's really cool.

I think we need to separate between two completely different types of kids -
wanabee-programmers, and the rest of the kids.

To wanabee-programmers, I'd stress the customizability, possibility to modify
everything the program does, learning from other people's code, publishing
your version to others, and so on, as well as the community aspects. You
can tell them that with Linux they can do on their home computer amazing
stuff like run their own servers just like the big companies do.

To everyone else, I doubt these will be interesting - I doubt that 80% of
the kids in a typical class will even consider looking at source code, or
hang around in "geeky" forums about software. To these kids, I do believe
that other issues can be appealing, including freeness (tell them their
parents can save 1,000 shekels when buying a new computer by not buying
Windows or Office), and, belive it or not, convenience (Linux distributions
come with hundreds of software, that on Windows you need to install
separately).

You can also tell them that X% of the Internet's servers use free software,
that their favorite companies like Google, Facebook or whatever use them,
and so on.

You can tell them that Linux programmers are rarer and make more money in
the job market ;-)

You can tell them about the possibility of running both Windows and Linux,
e.g., using a live CD or a virtual machine (although the latter is pretty
complicated).

And tell us how it went!

Thanks,
Nadav.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Monday, Jan 10 2011, 5 Shevat 5771
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Willpower: The ability to eat only one
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |salted peanut.