Just to be a little realistic: is there some "school activity" that makes using closed-software mandatory because there isn't an open-source alternative?
Because it was the only available software for that specific course or because your teacher told you "this is the software, period"?
Sure, they can purchase hosted enterprise versions of open source software. Of course, enterprise open source solutions have to compete on the same playing field as proprietary solutions (and many of them do! E.g. Gitlab).
Why should a school district care if there’s source code available? What are they going to do with it?
RMS subscribes to the flawed idea that the legitimately admirable ideals of FSF/GNU are important to everyone because they’re important to him. The idea that someone in charge of any organization, school, or business is going to make purchasing decisions based on ideology is somewhat naive.
The fact that some administration doesn't care about software freedoms at that point in time, does not make those freedoms void or not worthy of reminder.
It's like if you'd say that free speech isn't important because you have nothing to say. It's naive.
Software is a tool like any other tool, and we all make trade-offs based on our priorities.
...except for the folks like Richard Stallman. They’re willing to suffer through bad solutions (or have the time and skills to write their own) just to maintain this ideological line in the sand.
The thing is, people who have real jobs and aren’t just academics like Stallman have to get shit done.
Sure, a lot of open source software is actually better than proprietary alternatives. a lot of open source software is an easy choice.
I’d like to see Richard Stallman run a wedding photography business without touching proprietary software. Or a restaurant. Or a scalable, highly available SaaS company.
If he ever had a job that made him do any of those things, he’d quickly realize that as CEO instead of chief computer tinkerer you suddenly start making those trade-offs.
“I could pay 5 engineers devote 10% of their time to maintaining and patching a monitoring system, or I can just buy Datadog.”
“I can spend 20% more time editing photos, or I can just buy Photoshop.”
“I can spend 20% of our IT person’s time maintaining our self-hosted video conference solution and email server, or I can just buy G Suite.”
Schools are actually one of the worst places for open source software. K-12 institutions are not technical and need a ton of hand-holding. And if the stuff breaks, your students will sit there twiddling their thumbs wasting taxpayer dollars.