something i’ve fantasized about, as taking a collective hammer to the knees of enormous asshole software companies, would be if the schools/colleges/universities etc all switched away from proprietary software. right now, i know the decision makers are getting insane discounts and kickbacks and whatever the fuck to agree to enterprise licenses for things like MS Office, ESRI, Adobe so that those programs are what students learn to use in writing articles, creating/processing data, doing analysis, copy editing, visual design, etc. it’s all done under the justification that “these programs look good on a resume”, but it mostly creates a dependency. also, if you leave school to become self-employed, you’re SOL or you have to start kind-of anew with FOSS.

when i was in grad school i did a supplemental concentration in digital mapping that, looking back, was clearly run by some buck-the-system types… because the 3 course curriculum was entirely developed around using only open source software. all QGIS, free / open data sources, open mapping projects, open source scripts for developing our own interfaces for interactive maps. it was wildly empowering and it made me realize how only learning how to do things on proprietary software is extremely limiting for the student in a way that is difficult to recognize by the student and really only services the software company, which is getting devoted customers out of the deal.

anyway, clearly the machine that makes proprietary software the default has been wildly successful and seems deeply entrenched at this point, so it would have to be part of a much larger reform for our school systems to transition away. but i imagine once it started, those companies would be on the road to collapse.