Teaching GIScience with FOSS4G - is there an alternative?

I have been introduced to the world of GIS through a suite of proprietary GIS packages. Later, I have learned, used, and contributed to a suite of open source libraries. I am now an academic, and it is my role to teach the next generation the fundamentals of GIScience. I am constantly exposed to the tension between the need to teach transferable knowledge while helping students to acquire immediately useable skills applicable upon graduation. I this talk, I will briefly comment on the relative tensions between these two poles, the difficulties to teach principles with both FOSS4G and proprietary software, and try to reconcile them along a continuum. I will use my own war stories to capture how I think about this dichotomy. I will most likely conclude that diversity is key, that the ability to apply the principles across tools is better in the geospatial domain is greater than in other disciplines, and that academia needs to feel a stronger sense of engagement from the industry to respond to the current trends in a more timely manner.