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It is said that the power of advertising is what made a baker to buy bread from another
bakery. We can not afford that in an education environment when so many governments
have marketised education and yet they also believe education can provide equitable
distribution of income in the days when there is a wide cry on societal inequalities. In this
paper, I argue that education institutions should not buy unnecessary proprietary software
when there is a freely available version of the same software in open source. Jean
Michael dale and Nicholas Jullien’s paper entitled OPEN-SOFTWARE ( Linux, Open
work bench) vs. PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE ( windows, ms office) informs my
argument.
Open source is defined as computer software for which the source code and certain rights
are provided freely under a software license that meets open source definition or public
domain while proprietary software is computer software which is the legal property of
one party and the rights of usage are made available to the public through a priced
license. (Wikipedia, 2009).
The fact that proprietary software is a legal property brings the following disadvantages
to education institutions: the software is not free, used through a license, has exclusive
legal rights, user subjugating, closed software, rights of copying or modifying are
protected by laws.