Applying Proprietary Software Skills to Free Software

infoivonblog.nkfjt@aleeas.com (Ivon Huang) — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 21:00:00 +0800

Learn From Proprietary Software, Then Apply Those Skills to Free Software, Just Like Switching From Microsoft Office to LibreOffice

Why is it that the computer office and image-processing software operations taught in school always promote proprietary (closed source) software?

Why must reports be written with Microsoft Office, photo editing done with Photoshop, video editing done with Premiere, modeling done with Maya, statistics run with SPSS……? Even reading PDFs absolutely requires downloading Acrobat, and extracting non-.rar files also requires WinRAR. All these many things, without exception, are proprietary software? Usually proprietary software is commercial software. Although some of it is free of charge to use, it is neither free nor open source, and the license terms often restrict the scope of use.

If You Learn Proprietary Software From Childhood, Is There Any Possibility of Awakening and Switching to Free Software?
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I remember once reading an extreme article on Xuite. In a conspiratorial tone, it accused Taiwanese schools of teaching only how to use Microsoft products, including Windows and Office, as a typical collusion among government, industry, and academia! Microsoft opened cram schools across Taiwan to train instructors, companies all use Office products, and then students are forced to learn Microsoft products so they can meet the talent needs of companies. We should be teaching Linux and free software instead!

I agree with the article’s point of view, and the same applies to software for other uses. Schools eagerly talk about using proprietary design software, such as the Adobe suite, and many professional engineering programs are also proprietary, requiring expensive licenses. They start from when students are still children. Proprietary software is learned from elementary school to university, with everyone diligently working toward certification exams, as if there were no other choices in the world. Ask them why these programs must be adopted, and they will say this is the industry standard; if they do not teach these, students will have no jobs after graduation.

But if it has always been this way, does that make it right?

To be honest, I cannot offer any solution either. The Software Liberty Association Taiwan once promoted the ezgo operating system, an Ubuntu system carrying a customized KDE desktop with built-in software corresponding to various school subjects, intending to promote free software…… It is still maintained, but it does not look very successful, and its reputation is not as strong as internationally mainstream Linux distributions. Most schools continue buying Windows licenses, or spend heavily purchasing Macs for artistic needs. To see free Linux on campus, you probably have to go to computer science department labs.

Although the promotion of free software on campus has made a tiny bit of progress, and there are successful examples of free software migration in the corporate world, such as the Free Software Service Vendor Alliance, and the Taiwanese government has also comprehensively promoted using ODF format to exchange official documents, the cruel truth is that free software still cannot beat commercial software. Whether in the mainstream market or in many people’s minds, free software is not a primary choice. Some people even think free and open source software information is too messy and harder to use. Without strong vendor involvement in maintenance, they dare not use it.

LibreOffice on Ivon's Blog

Applying Proprietary Software Skills to Free Software

If You Learn Proprietary Software From Childhood, Is There Any Possibility of Awakening and Switching to Free Software? #

If You Learn Proprietary Software From Childhood, Is There Any Possibility of Awakening and Switching to Free Software?
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