A lot of scientific and/or Open Source projects would probably be very happy to get server hardware like that. Pick out a handful or two of projects that you enjoy, have enjoyed in the past, or just find important, and ask them if they want any of it - they'll most likely be very happy!
First of all, keep it simple. Please, don't flood the youth with all sorts of things they wont understand... I mean, pointer arithmetics can fool even professional software developers every once in a while.
My recommendation is to go with something that's made for young people - Ruby and Hackety Hack is a great example of that; Ruby because it's (usually) quite easy to understand what a program does simply by reading it out loud, and Hackety Hack because it's... well, made to solve your exact problem. Plus, Ruby makes a great platform to later demonstrate OO and what have we.
But whatever you end up with, please, for the love of god, don't use a statically typed language - it just makes the learning curve unnecesarilly high for no particular reason.
What an incredible load of bullshit from someone otherwise knowledgable on the area. I'm quite baffled that he doesn't seem to realize that open source is more of a philosophy (some might even call it a religion) than anything else, money or no money.
Open source isn't charity, it's a community-oriented development approach that will exist because *the community* needs it.
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A lot of scientific and/or Open Source projects would probably be very happy to get server hardware like that. Pick out a handful or two of projects that you enjoy, have enjoyed in the past, or just find important, and ask them if they want any of it - they'll most likely be very happy!
First of all, keep it simple. Please, don't flood the youth with all sorts of things they wont understand... I mean, pointer arithmetics can fool even professional software developers every once in a while. My recommendation is to go with something that's made for young people - Ruby and Hackety Hack is a great example of that; Ruby because it's (usually) quite easy to understand what a program does simply by reading it out loud, and Hackety Hack because it's... well, made to solve your exact problem. Plus, Ruby makes a great platform to later demonstrate OO and what have we. But whatever you end up with, please, for the love of god, don't use a statically typed language - it just makes the learning curve unnecesarilly high for no particular reason.
What an incredible load of bullshit from someone otherwise knowledgable on the area. I'm quite baffled that he doesn't seem to realize that open source is more of a philosophy (some might even call it a religion) than anything else, money or no money. Open source isn't charity, it's a community-oriented development approach that will exist because *the community* needs it.