Free Software and Education What Does Free Software Have To Do
With Education? Software freedom has an especially important
role in education. Educational institutions of all levels should
use and teach Free Software because it is the only software that
allows them to accomplish their essential missions: to
disseminate human knowledge and to prepare students to be good
members of their community. The source code and the methods of
Free Software are part of human knowledge. On the contrary,
proprietary software is secret, restricted knowledge, which is
the opposite of the mission of educational institutions. Free
Software supports education, proprietary software forbids
education. Free Software is not just a technical question; it is
an ethical, social, and political question. It is a question of
the human rights that the users of software ought to have.
Freedom and cooperation are essential values of Free Software.
The GNU System implements these values and the principle of
sharing, since sharing is good and