Open Source Solution for Education

To end the use of pirated softwares, first we need to change our point of view that doesn't mean Microsoft Windows and Office Application doesn't mean Microsoft Office. I remember when I was in Junior high school, I was taught to to use operating system Wordstar and Lotus. Wordstar is a text editor and Lotus is a spreadsheet application. The OS at that time was DOS.
Then, Microsoft Windows and Office became popular and people became addicted and think that they are the only OS and Office application. It is understood because they see all the time everywhere and never think the OS and Office apps are pirated ones.
We can start to change if we have opened our minds that there are some other OS's and software which we can use to fulfill our need.
One of them is Linux OS to change our pirated Windows. It is open source and free because Linux is maintained by community so it will always free. If we have to pay, it will be worthwhile because we will get support from the distribution. And it is far cheaper than if we buy Windows.
There are hundreds of distributions (we call it distro) in Linux so we can choose one of them which suits our needs. Even, we can make our own distro to adapt to our special needs. Some big distros are Mandrake/Mandriva, RedHat, Suse, Fedora Core, Ubuntu, Xandros, Simply Mepis and many more. Some of them come with completely free software and some with commercial software with full support. We can choose the best for us. Distributions like Ubuntu, Simply Mepis, Knoppix and DSL are based on Live CD so we can run the OS and it's applications from the CD and we do not need to install anything on our harddrive so it won't affect our data. The aim is to know the compatibility of our computers and also to work faster without installing.
to be continued ....