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... helped introduce thousands of students to linux.

Why is that so good, and so worth lots of government money?

> Why is that so good..

It encourages tinkering which is especially important for students.

Also, many other general benefits that open-source brings. For example, open source code is more trustable than closed source.

Yeah but if GNULinux is free in the first place, why spend so much govt. money on it?

GNU/Linux is Free as in Speech, not Free as in Beer. Much like printing presses and political campaigns still cost money, so does hardware and especially so does the time to mentor someone on how to use GNU/Linux.

For many organizations, Windows is actually monetarily cheaper than Linux, particularly organizations that need to deploy non-web GUI applications for users who are never going to be comfortable on a terminal.

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