And same goes for less technical disciplines too. Adobe, Autodesk, Archicad, etc. It's pretty bad software: expensive, very buggy, poor extensibility, poorly maintained, closed-source, rapid tech debt accumulation requires upgrading your pc every few years. If only a minor percentage of organizations licensing it would instead spend that budget financing an open source project, that would have a very positive effect for everyone. I can somewhat understand private businesses not thinking long-term, but public institutions paying licensing fees instead of financing open-source seems like plain incompetence. Then again, maybe there's a lack of open-source initiatives willing to spearhead this.
But if students learn some open-source software that doesn’t get used in private industry, will they be able to land a job that’s asking Autodesk et al. knowledge as a requirement?
As a former medical and scientific illustrator, learning a software package (Photoshop or GIMP) really isn't as crucial as learning principles and practices of art, design, and graphics. Color theory, negative space, composition, etc., are critical to production and apply to any media one chooses to work in: oil on canvas, pen and ink, or computers.
The other issue is access. Again, from an art/graphics/design perspective, costs associated with proprietary software can limit some students from even participating in art/graphics/design programs. Adobe Creative Suite is US$69.99/mo or US$840/yr.
It's not the job of a university to prepare you for the workplace. That's the job of the workplace. I'm sick of industry outsourcing their jobs to public institutions.
It's the job of a university to teach cutting edge research
Sure, you can say that. But a good chunk of people will disagree with you. I went to one of the top schools, and it was fairly 30/70 between teaching “cutting edge research” and teaching “what’s being used in practice”. I think that was fair. During bachelors, hardly you’ll get cutting edge research cause you don’t have prerequisite knowledge.
Agree with this 100%. At some point the private sector decided that it will accept no responsibilities of any kind (except for what was fought and defended tooth and nail by the civil society and a few slightly more responsible governments), and all the costs that can be avoided will be avoided, shifting the burden on the public sector.
It's not a big jump to go from open-source equivalents of the close source products. The concept and what one wants to accomplish is the same. Many of these companies have certification programs, if the point is to be specific and narrow, for a particular job.
Good points. Funding the open-source equivalents, even at a fraction of what they are spending on close-source, would have circumvented the problem of being "trapped" in the first place. Even more, the universities would be able to contribute code to the projects, if they wanted to.
It was always pretty obvious what Microsoft wanted and was trying to do. Now trying to escape, will be painful, but that's the price they will have to endure if they want freedom and data sovereignty.
I don't think it's a stretch. I've numerous close friends that work with it daily and I've helped troubleshoot some of the issues. After Effects is quite hated among them, but has to be used, because there aren't viable alternatives. Illustrator crashes randomly. Photoshop has multi-decade bugs in color handling. But, the fact that their resource use baloons yearly and thus forces the industry to waste on constant hardware upgrades would be enough to discredit Adobe software, imo.
