Re: [Fsfe-uk] Linux for Kids Briefing

[Alex Hudson]

On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 11:58 +0100, Ian Lynch wrote:
> You also create a culture where the kids feel proud to be positive
> rather than negative contributors to the community. Encouraging or
> even tolerating them brining down servers, vandalising disc drives and
> downloading porn is bad enough, but allowing them to link such
> behaviour to Linux is real bad marketing. Even if its not specific to
> Linux that association could well be the one they remember.

No, I'm not trying to associate it with GNU/Linux - none of my points
actually had anything to do with GNU/Linux, except to note that a well-
locked-down system would be much more likely to withstand children.

Children play, that's in their nature. While bad behaviour will always
be damaging to computers, there are lots of things that could be
construed as "bad" that actually aren't. Children are naturally
inquisitive, and there is the whole "what will happen when I press this
button now?". That kind of curiosity can easily result in "bad things"
happening, whether it being a server crashing or not, but isn't
necessarily the result of bad behaviour.

I certainly don't condone bad behaviour, but equally I think to expect
children to use computers strictly according to instructions is not
likely to happen (either intentionally or not). There isn't really any
excuse for computers that have to be operated in a certain way else they
fall over. And from that point of view I think GNU/Linux makes more
obvious sense, because you can remove the bits you don't need and the
simpler the system, the more likely it is to be robust. 

Cheers,

Alex.