[December_Stars]

And how will we start the change to more open systems, except by starting in the start of the workforce chain in schools?

Imagine if schools starting teaching everyone Blender over Autodesk Maya, for instance. We create a workforce where most people will end up knowing Blender over Maya. At that point, there is a compelling reason for enterprises to switch, and we see a world in which Blender becomes dominant and where people will encounter it in their daily working lives.

There are practical reasons to do this - Blender is free so schools pay significantly less, it still has its usage in freelance/smaller companies, and it has a wealth of resources from its large community on learning it compared to Maya. Many free/open source software suites are similar in these aspects compared to their proprietary counterparts. This, alongside the ideological reasons, is enough to switch.

And the ideological part matters too! In the English classes I've taken they regularly teach individualism and critical thinking. Why then, should we take away that thinking aspect when it comes to software and just tell students "use whatever they use, don't question its ethics?"

We have to start somewhere, and there's no better place to do so than schools, where it still benefits the school and students overall to use free software over proprietary software.