These pages are in development and do not reflect the position of the GNU project.

Free Software in Your School

What kind of software are the computers in your school using? If it's not free software, you could speak to your teacher or principal about it. Here are some good arguments you can use:

• You always have access to the source code to free software. This means that you can study how the program works and learn more about it.
• You may redistribute copies of free software so you can help your neighbor. This means that it is much cheaper to share the software with many students.
• With free software comes freedom and cooperation, which is good for schools in general.

Does your school use free software?

One good thing to do is to write a petition to your principal about the issue and let other students sign it. You can use this text:

To: [[The name of your principal here]]

Free software is software that comes with permission for anyone to use, copy, 
and distribute, either verbatim or with modifications, either gratis or for a 
fee. In particular, this means that source code must be available.

With free software comes freedom and cooperation, which is good for schools in 
general.

Our school can save money with free software, which we are free to copy and 
redistribute so that we can make copies for all the computers we have.

We can learn about and study how the software works if we use free software, with
which you always have access to the source code.

Free software is not only good in schools. It is always good. If we learn how to
use it in our school, we will be able to use it in a more effective way after we 
graduate.

There is much information about free software at gnu.org and at fsf.org.

We demand removal of all the proprietary software in our schools computers and
a free software replacement.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned