I received an interesting link in my email this morning. The story (which thinks that sauce and source are the same thing btw)  covers a school in the United States that has banned the use of Linux because “anything that wasn’t Windows was illegal and immoral.”

I could only ponder about the sheer stupidity of this teacher and wonder about the next generation of students brought up under this ignorance.

I grew up with Microsoft, with DOS 3 as my first Operating System and went through DOS 5, 6, Windows 3.1, 95, NT, 98, & ME.

I also played around with BeOS, and various versions of Mac.

I was then introduced to Linux turned into an open source zealot and wiped out my Windows installation in anger. Since then, while my primary operating system is Linux, I still have Windows running on my Laptop and have both Windows & Linux on my home computer.

I have since worked with Windows 2000, XP, 2003 & Vista. I love what Microsoft does with these products. They do innovative things, pick up features from other products that are useful and try to simplify things.

My Laptop came pre-installed with Windows and I never went to the effort of installing Linux and I use my home computer to play games, which (whether I like it or not) just handles games so much better.

As per the old joke, It is the software engineers job to make software as idiot proof as possible. It is the job of the universe to create bigger and bigger idiots. So far the universe is winning.

Linux & Open Source software (in general) takes a different approach to software. It should be easy to use and manage software but it also expects you to understand (or at least think about) what you are doing or trying to do.

Microsoft seems to be under the impression that this is not necessary. The user does not need to know what they are doing – they just need to know what is to happen. e.g.

Lets take a simple operation – deleting a file. Before Windows 95, this used to be a simple, difficult to undo operation. Windows 95 brings in the concept of the Recycle Bin (or Trash), a concept that was available on the Mac platform for quite some time.

After this point, you no longer delete a file on Windows – you move it to the Recycle Bin, which will delete them from the disk when the number of files in there exceeds the set capacity.

Now, from a users perspective, what they are doing is deleting a file – in fact, thats what the menu item says – Delete. But what happens is completely different. The file disappears from their folder. What they aimed to do – “make this file disappear” has happened. However, the file has not been deleted.

Windows has effectively lied to the user since it is “smarter”. If the user later discovers that they deleted the wrong file, it can be recovered easier. However, that is not the point.

Microsoft software, are in general rife with such miscommunications. I find this fairly insulting and this was one of the main reasons that I started using Linux.  If you ask it to delete a file – it deletes it. If you want to move something to recycle bin, it can do that too.

To go back to the original point, the ignorance shown by the teacher in this school is exactly the kind that Microsoft panders to. Microsoft allows (nay encourages)  its users to be as “simple” as possible and let Microsoft worry about the rest.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that Microsoft do a fantastic job in making software accessible and easy to use but it should also help educate it users on what they are doing and help them think about what they are trying to do. Don’t pretend or try to do their thinking for them. Thats their job.

“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish ; and you have fed him for a lifetime”