A professor of a college working on a rural computerization project, was chatting to me once.We were working on a government school in a Remote village in Karnataka.That was I supposed to Install a classroom PC for children of 5th Standard and above.He asked me,"Why do you need Linux for children, if we are not able to use it,how will they be?". I was not surprised at the reaction but you can expect that from a person who has been much ignorant about Linux and Open Source in general and was working on it just because government had asked him to do so.My answer to question was,"Children are like wet cement, whatever you put on the makes an impression.Tell me one thing, what was your first tryst with computer like, and how would have it been if you would have seen Linux in the first place itself and were told that this is how a computer desktop looks like?" Children are better learners than grownups. As grown ups we develop perspectives and have rigidity of thought, we have to admit we have, and this what restricts us from people to accept new things and adopt changes.Now, the hard reality is that children don't run companies and are not the decision makers for the corporations :). To sell them Open Source we need to understand their perspectives, and design our presentations accordingly.

Coming back to the topic, childern love freedom, which is the true essence of open source software.How does it make things easy for children? I will tell you with an example.Once during such installation, I saw an observent child looking at the way I was installing and he asked me many random intelligent questions.I sat with a Kannada translator to make him undestand the computer system, told him what an OS is and installation steps.He was a quick learner and got onto installation in a flash. I inspected an installation done by him, corrected him where ever required and he off he was, he prepared the whole lab of 6 computers.I did the classroom server confguration and with a small training in Kannada, children like magic could do advanced things like accessing a shared folder and install software through the synaptic package manager.They loved the Edcuation games suite with Edubuntu and also had fun painting with Gimp and Kpaint

Well, now you can judge at which we should start exposing Open Source,so that our future is Free and Open.