Texas Support for Open Source Technology Education

OpenSourceForAll writes "North Lake College in Irving, TX is offering the first Open Source Technology certificate in the U.S. beginning Spring of 2006. The certificate program was made possible through a grant by the Texas Skills Standards Board. As a TSSB-recognized program, open source will finally get the corporate and industrial exposure it deserves. We believe the program is the only one of its kind in the nation at the community college level. Our goal is to promote Open Source as a business philosophy and as a way of life rather than limiting the program to a few token OSS offerings. Among the courses to be offered: The Philosophy of Open Source, a series of LAMP courses, and a capstone course which will focus on OSS development practices. Courses will be offered both on-line and on-campus."

Comments

I agree, but even better...

[KingSkippus]

I would love to take that course.

I agree, I would too. But even better, I'd like to send some people to that course, especially intermediate manager/technical types at my company. They're the ones, unfortunately, who just don't get it and need to be educated about the principles of Open Source and what makes it worthwhile.

The 50-Front War

[c,mma]

Making the study of Open Source software and philosophy available to students as formal curriculum can only help to further establish an already unstoppable momentum. Microsoft must now open yet another front in their battle against open source. From MS's academic "studies" that attack open source as a viable platform for governments and private citizens, to their secret slashdot promoters, to their highly-paid lobbyists in every country, MS must now take the war into the offices of, I hope, what will become thousands of college administrations, and somehow persuade them NOT to offer a view contrary to the official Redmond way. Good luck, MS!

LAMP? PHP? Python? Perl?

[CyricZ]

What sort of "LAMP" are they talking about here? Does the "P" represent Python, PHP, or Perl? Some combination of the three?

What about FAMP (FreeBSD, Apache, MySQL, Python) or NAPRR (NetBSD, Apache, PostgreSQL, Ruby on Rails), and so on?

I don't think it's a good program if it doesn't expose the students to the entire open source community. It's good for such business people to be aware of the alternatives to commercial, closed source software. But it's also important for them to realize that the open source community isn't limited to Linux, MySQL and PHP. There are often far better (ie. more secure, less resource-intensive, etc.) pieces of open source software out there. And if their developers suggest the use of such alternatives, it would be beneficial if they had some knowledge of them.