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I read an interesting article by Gurdy Leet, an art professor, who migrated from closed source tools to open source tools (and operating systems). They moved from MacOSX with AdobeCS to Ubuntu (ppc) with Gimp, inkscape, scribus.

Perhaps just as interesting is the dichotomy found within the comments. People shouting that Leet should be fired by doing a diservice to his students by not preparing them for the industry are at one end and people claiming that his students can focus more on the creative process, than getting bogged up in the tools.

Hmmm, my CS studies felt very similar to what Leet was doing. We focused on the theory. I didn't learn any perl, python, xml, web programming, eclipse, visual studio, etc in school. Most of my programming was done in C (with a little Lisp and Java). In fact my most practical "realworld" class was my senior project (a colloborative browsing engine, using javascript, applets, servlets, perl, apache and mysql). Yet here I am being productive and learning tools after learning the theory.... (I admit that I've met good programmers who just learned tools though, with no/little theory).