Schools Should Exclusively Use Free Software (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Schools Should Exclusively Use Free Software (2014)

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418 pointscrazypython286 comments

Speaking as a student whose school primarily uses Google's suite (classroom, meet, etc..) but still has a few older solutions, some of which are free software, I can say that there's a common argument that schools should focus on pragmatism and working with what they have - the age-old argument that free software still is not accessible or easy to use. I don't beleive that this is still an issue.

Out of my current teachers and teachers I've had in the past, almost all of them were vocal about not liking Classroom or just didn't use it. It is basically a small layer on top of Google Drive & Meet that does not integrate anything nearly well enough. Most of my teachers seem to prefer Canvas, a free software solution to this, because it has more features. My teachers primarily cited the integrated quiz/test system as its biggest draw when I asked.

Classroom is also is very difficult for less-privileged students to use - speaking as someone who used to rely on a 4 GB of RAM netbook with a Pentium and was still using it for part of this quarantine, even with Linux things really get slow. This could primarily be attributed to relying on a lot of Google tabs at once (for Drive, forms for quizzes, etc) while Canvas I've never had to open more than a few maximum. My only other option is to buy a Chromebook and while my school can afford Chromebooks for every student, many students are relying on just using what they have.

With that, I don't think that the proprietary software really has all too much of an advantage in terms of pragmatism (which imo is even more important in schools). I don't think the usual arguments against adoption of free software really seem to hold up, though I assume that cost might be an issue that I'm not aware of seeing my district is rather rich.

I'd love to hear more teachers opinions on this. Hopefully this gave you an idea of how education tech is from a student user's endpoint.

A major problem isn’t at the user level but the admin level. Cloud SaaS means someone else installs and maintains the backend. Many school districts do not have the in house talent to do this, or what talent they do have is too busy putting out fires.

Administrating systems is generally hell. They have to be kept updated, secured, etc. The rise of closed SaaS is in part to free people from the curse of IT and system administration.

Can we make IT and admin easier? Yes, but nobody has done the work and it isn’t likely anyone will since there is no economic model.

Yes. This is a huge cost for school districts, particularly since both G Suite and Microsoft 365 are free for schools and require practically zero admin time. There's no competition in terms of cost here.

You are equating non-free software and cloud SaaS. There is no reason the software can't be free and also be available as a cloud SaaS offering. This is exactly what Canvas, the application mentioned bt the gp, offers. It is free and open source software but most users opt for the cloud SaaS offering so that they don't need to host it themselves and take on the maintenance and IT costs.

I think it's unlikely that Stallman would consider a hosted offering of Canvas to be 'free software'. But I agree with you that it can be both SaaS and free.

Although at that point I question what advantage free software gives you - you can't change it and you are still at the mercy of the hosting company since you aren't able to host it yourself.

Paying someone to run something you can and in the future could run yourself could in theory be wholly compatible with the ideals of free software and user freedom.

This is totally true. My institution is able to deploy software at schools because we are managing it for them. Sometimes we have to host on their own server, but we still do the deployment. Doing otherwise would lead to 100% rejection of using our software (ps: it's research stuff, not commercial).

UNC Wilmington had their Blackboard installation go down for nearly a week in 2018 because of hurricane Florence. I know that was a big factor in their decision to switch to a SaaS. Not that they couldn't have moved their stuff into a cloud hosting provider, but like you said, that's a big ask for an IT team to do in one summer when there are off the shelf solutions.

>the age-old argument that free software still is not accessible or easy to use

Personally I'd say most of the time the problem is the lack of documentation, help, manuals, guides etc.

I had so many times when I had a problem with a software under Linux and basically you have to spend hours in Google trying to find that stackexchange/reddit/askubuntu thread where you might find your answer, or not.

This works into my other comment about how training is provided for big box purchases. No one in any form of academia has the time or money to develop their own training materials - the tool is supposed to benefit the students, anything that isn’t directly doing that isn’t a priority.

I agree with you in principal, but offer a small counterexample:

I was a student worker at a university with a documentation / training dept. We maintained a wiki used by faculty and staff. We encouraged adoption with other groups, and built out a library of articles on tech resources, like how to use screen recording software to make and edit videos for the classroom.

We also had dedicated hours in one of the computer labs, where one of us would be present to help anyone with questions on using Blackboard, wiki, etc.

So in some cases they are trying, but to your original point, we only had 3-4 people, mostly part time trying to provide training and documentation. I think we made a difference, but there was a lot more that could be done we didn't have resources for.

Poor documentation practice is pervasive in the free software world. Much of the issue, I believe, is the rise of sites like Stackoverflow. Documentation these days seems to consist of the bare minimum--docs autogenerated from method/function signatures with maybe one or two trivial, useless examples--and an expectation that people will "tinker" with the software and post/find answers on these sites. Google and Stackoverflow, in other words, are the documentation of choice.

I understand: documentation is hard. It's tedious and it's difficult to get right for all the likely/major audiences involved. That's not a good excuse, though. The amount of fad-driven, cargo-cult coding and the like has just exploded in the last few years, much of it essentially copy-pasta from sites like Stackoverflow or whatever a Google search throws up.

Not in my experience. I’ve spent a lot of time reading documentation since switching to a Linux desktop about two years ago. Of course, lots of software is poorly documented, but I’ve learned far more from the systemd man pages than I ever learned from Windows knowledge base articles. And even when documentation is completely lacking (as it is for a lot of proprietary software), you can look at the source.

Windows has that problem, but also had a millions companies trying to buy up the top search slots.

I think the problem is not the lack of documentation, it is that people don't know what documentation is.

The iPhone 10 or 11 or wherever we are, does...

...not ship with a manual! Have you ever noticed that? In fact, documentation is the reason why people struggle with Linux, not the lack thereof. iOS tries to make things obvious. But obvious means obvious for some people and I assume they maximise for the set of people looking for a smartphone and perhaps more money than average, with some vague I idea of what kind of UI "looks current".

In fact, there is a story about a somewhat famous programmer going on sabbatical with only an installation of one of the BSD variants and from the documentation was able to make commits to the code... Maybe someone remembers who it was? It was mentioned on HN comments.

Having said that, yes, it is difficult to read documentation! And that's why people struggle with Linux, because it is a massive time investment.

Sounds like John Carmack. I seem to recall him doing one of his famous "lock myself in a hotel room and don't come out until I've hacked something cool" things, this time with setting up and using an OpenBSD workstation.

And yes, one time I was fooling with NetBSD and went from zero to hello-world kernel device driver with just the man pages. So it's not surprising Carmack would be able to do the same with OpenBSD.

Right you are! Here is the HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23224584

Developer documentation and user documentation are two things. Also, programmdr commited to make commits will put way more effort into figuring things out and into experimenting then is reasonable for user who has completely different job.

> Personally I'd say most of the time the problem is the lack of documentation, help, manuals, guides etc.

This is a very “blue pill” way of looking at technology. Like when a huge company releases a SaaS product, and it observed a high bounce rate from the first few days of trial usage of your new Educational Software, blah blah blah, the metrics, blah blah, improve documentation to improve the metric, because that logically seems to be related to the bounce rate, and look there’s this Net Promoter Score survey that says people didn’t use the stuff we put in there or they seem confused so of course onboarding is what we’re missing...

Linux is in disguise the most used operating system in the world, it’s the worst example to bring up because you’re talking about real pain points. But this whole idea of “pain points” and the metrics and the onboarding and documentation stuff, this is just a bunch of post hoc rationalizing business speak, a form of astrology in product development that would have been 200% wrong about Linux’s success and will continue to be wrong about all sorts of software. And then you’ll jump into pedantry, like “oh I meant specifically software under Linux not Linux itself,” or whatever.

Listen it doesn’t matter, documentation doesn’t really matter, the people writing documentation for unsuccessful or useless stuff will not make it useful by writing documentation. Documentation can’t fix what’s wrong with a piece of broken software. However it is an enteprise product, it is a piece of utterly worthless differentiation that salespeople can go out and sell and buyers can go buy, and the money changed hands, so of course everyone is out there talking about how important it is.

Don’t use software that’s hard for you to use! No one is forcing you to write systemd units, iptables commands, command like arguments for ffpmeg etc. And yet, it must piss you off so much that there are people basically selling this free software in wrappers. You’re willing to try at least, which is good, and it’s not coming from a place of valuing your time or from lack of knowledge or accessibility - it’s from the ethos of not being ripped off, of giving the people doing the valuable thing (writing the software not the docs) most of the value, and not some commercial halfwit middleman. The ethos of being revolted about giving money to some giant company, so that some VP who doesn’t do anything can chauffeur his kids to their pod in the repurposed yoga studio on 1 Main Street of his suburban home’s town.

This is what free software for education is about. When the time isn’t super important, when the money is either not spent or sucked up by cronies - certainly not spent efficiently - you want a piece of software that is compatible with the ethos of what education is really about.

Education, more than anything else, is fundamentally opposed to the enriching of middlemen. In software middlemen tend to slap documentation on free stuff.

Don't tar all free software with the brush of Linux software doco, though. This is not a universal.

> I had so many times when I had a problem with a software under Linux and basically you have to spend hours in Google trying to find that stackexchange/reddit/askubuntu thread where you might find your answer, or not.

In my experience, the only way that differs from proprietary software is that developers of free software are less likely to ban you or threaten legal action for drawing attention to said problem.

I think a bigger problem is that there is no training involved. I worked in higher ed (tech side) for a few years, and every time they bought a package (for admissions management, grades, donations, etc) there was training provided as part of the purchase.

You don’t get that with free software, and for your average professor/admissions rep/grant writer/alumni nagger that’s a big deal. It doesn’t matter if it’s the 100% perfect solution to every problem they have... if they don’t know how to use it.

Educational software isn't my field, but there is training available for free software in other fields.

Occasionally, it's a way to fund development.

This is an interesting observation, thank you! I wonder if there's value in creating open source training as well. This sounds like a great way that non-programmers could contribute.

Yes, there is. Selling books, seminars, and certifications is very common in the Linux world.

But most of those are targeted to the IT side of things, aren't they?

I don't recall having seen much targeting end users.

It really depends on what you're looking for. I've found for popular applications there are usually tutorials on Youtube at the very least.

I completely agree. I mean Moodle was insanely popular at the time, but the IT guy who installed it had to go around teaching everyone how to use it - to the extent that there were multiple sessions booked in the auditorium where he demo’d it.

That’s fine, but relatively expensive when you consider that the IT guy’s time could have been better used elsewhere and that the IT department didn’t get any additional funding because they saved the university untold amounts of money that were provided by grants.

It’s also difficult to con alumni into donating for “Joe to do training on blah”... but donating to purchase the revolutionary new software from blah to increase admissions and donations while reducing labor is an easy sell.

That sounds like a business opportunity for the IT guy to develop a curriculum and sell it to other schools.

This seems like boring work that people might not be excited about doing for free. What about crowdfunding materials that will be distributed under and open license?

My campus switched to Canvas while I was a student there. Training was provided to the professors. Whether the school developed the training themselves or purchased it as part of a service, I can’t really say although I suspect the latter. It seemed to have been largely effective because nearly all of my classes used Canvas for grades and many of them used additional features.

Maybe https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Training/tkb-p/Training

Exactly. If a stodgy old tenured professor doesn’t understand how to use the tool... he won’t.

You can’t expect the guy who has dedicated his career to the ancient Egyptian papyrus scrolls about floods in the Nile contributing to the growth of Mesopotamia to also just poke around with this new web-based tool and figure out how it works so he can transfer all his students over to it. He’ll just keep going with the printed page like he has for 40 years of teaching.

This is once again the confusion between free (gratis) software and Free (libre) software.

There are plenty of vendors who support Free software. They will install Free software and configure Free Software and provide whatever level of training is required for Free software. What they don't do is provide that value for free.

The difference between Free software and non-Free software is not that there is no training involved. It is that if you purchase Free software you end up with Free software, and if you purchase non-Free software, you end up with non-Free software. That's it.

Oh, and if someone decides they want to cut costs by not paying for something of value that they need, they will get what they paid for. That's orthogonal to the liberty of the underlying software.

Then who provides that training? And why aren't they knocking on the doors of all the schools in the country?

The big difference from the perspective of the schools is that proprietary software is backed by a big corporation that has made taking care of your needs their business model. There's nothing inherently stopping companies from offering the same quality of service with free software, but in practice free software often means doing things yourself and relying on a community of volunteers.

Meanwhile, for the big corps it's fine if this is a loss leader, because it teaches a new generation to use their products. You've got to get them while they're young, after all.

If you search a given free software (provided it's popular enough) with "onsite training" you will find a plethora of companies that provide it.

> Then who provides that training?

Depends on the product, there might be several to choose from. In the case of LibreOffice, there's an official list of recognised support providers, but LibreOffice don't offer paid support themselves. [0][1]

> The big difference from the perspective of the schools is that proprietary software is backed by a big corporation that has made taking care of your needs their business model.

With Free Software, the support provider might be the same organisation that develops the software, it depends. If you want support for Red Hat, you can get paid support from Red Hat themselves, or go with an independent support company. Red Hat have a certification scheme so you can get some official assurance they know what they're doing. [2]

[0] https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/

[1] https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/certification/

[2] https://www.redhat.com/en/services/certification/certificati...

>This is once again the confusion between free (gratis) software and Free (libre) software.

This happens because "free software" is a terrible name. It should be changed to "freedom-respecting software".

Or just Libre would be fine. I personally like L/OSS software, but that makes an unfortunate acronym.

FLOSS (free (libre) open source software). Because good Free software makes your smile brighter.

I just feel like adding free onto the beginning is more harmful than helpful at this point.

So many people have been conditioned that "Free is bad, and steals your data". Which is kind of ironic, but unfortunately true in my experience.

https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/free-libre-open

I like the acronym they suggest actually.

The only problem is that the usage of "Free" worries me. I recognize that it's for "Freedom", but Joe McConsumer both doesn't, and doesn't care enough to listen about it.

I got told the other day that Linux is bad because it's "Off brand Windows" because it's "free". This was after explaining the gratis/libre difference.

As somebody who teaches in university my opinion on this is:

1) the software you teach them should last them for a while. That means it shouldn't be to limiting (even if that means more user friendly). It should additionally be something where you can assume it will be around for a while in that form.

2) It should make it easy for them to work in the field that they are in.

3) The work they create in that programme should be readable for as long as possible (even when the creators of the software are gone)

4) We the technically educated are supposed to teach the societal ramifications of certain software products as well (privacy, surveillance) and how to guard from those. So software that doesn't spy, isn't creepy and etc gets a plus as well

Students don't have a ton of money, so if there is a free and open source solution that isn't bad on quality compared to the commercial (or data stealing) alternatives, I'd go for that, because it helps with nearly all the points above.

I am however not a friend of teaching people tools they cannot use. So while teaching someone Blender instead of Maya makes a ton of sense, because Blender is great and getting better, teaching someone Cinelerra when Premiere or Avid are a much better choice functionality wise is something I wouldn't do just for the heck of it.

Just to note, that University and the reality from the schools today under COVID-19, where teachers have to come-up with a solution fast are totally different. I see Countries adapting Google Classroom suite with much more success than the State trying to come up with their own custom and limited solution. My Wife is elementary teacher in Germany and we compared the tool that we have here, with Google Classroom and it's just embarrassing how they are using our taxpayer money in name of a privacy issue that really doesn't exist.

Where I live in the US I certainly see teachers using cobbled-together limited proprietary solutions were there is simple superior Free software . Eg. pasting their Zoom links at the top of the Google Classroom stream every day or letting them be buried down below pages of assignments (it seems that Classroom allows only Google Meet links to be included in the header), when leading Free LMSs like Canvas ship with native BigBlueButton integrations. And then using separate services like Nearpod to add interactivity to their Zooms, forcing constant context switching between the two tabs (dozens or even hundreds of times in a single class), when BigBlueButton would allow them to directly upload their slides and automatically detect multiple choice questions for instant integrated polls, and allow students to draw and type directly onto a whiteboard layer over the slides in real time.

The reality is that there is no better solution. You can find alternative for this or that component, but you have to deploy yourself, monitor, scale.. Teachers/Schools are on the front, without any support. From the solution point of view, Google Class is the only one that a School can manage, with a small budget, low technical knowledge and no time. Ask for money from task payers, to develop, integrate open source, maintain and deploy it, IMO, has almost no ROI or it's a 10 years plan, we need it now.

> you have to deploy yourself, monitor, scale

That’s flatly false.

Please don’t spread FUD. Your ignorance of better solutions is not proof they don’t exist.

You can go to https://demo.bigbluebutton.org/gl/signup, click “Sign up with Google” (or Twitter, or Microsoft 365, or create a BigBlueButton account), possibly click your Google Account profile picture/username, and done. You now have infinite BigBlueButton rooms. You can go to https://www.instructure.com/canvas/try-canvas#free-account and create a free account or “Request a demo of the full Canvas platform, and we’ll schedule an expert to walk you through the software.”

I'm not sure if you are trolling or you never used the Google classroom suite? For sure I know bigbluebutton, but it's not better than Google Classroom (we tried both) but if you don't want to deploy it yourself, the service offered online (which you linked here BTW) is much more expensive than Google classroom and offer much less disk space (which based on our research, was mandatory for the teachers, mainly because they wanted to scan their already existent homework and share it with the kids) . Check https://www.softwareadvice.com/lms/bigbluebutton-profile/vs/... and https://www.capterra.co.uk/compare/162664/186631/bigbluebutt... (I'm not associated with both websites BTW)

Those are weird (presumably auto-generated) apples to oranges comparison. BigBlueButton is just a powerful education-focused web-conferencing system that Learning Management Sytems like Canvas offer native integration with. It’s just like Google Meet with many more education features (uploading slides for interactive whiteboards, etc.) Canvas, Moodle, or something are the things you can compare to Classroom. BigBlueButton is not a LMS and Classrom is not a web conferencing system.

> with Google Classroom and it's just embarrassing how they are using our taxpayer money in name of a privacy issue that really doesn't exist.

You're saying Google doesn't have privacy issues?

Google has privacy issues? yes, definitely. But everything depends how do you use the tool right? In the scenario that we were designing, the parent creates an email for the kid, teacher has a paper list composed of name and email-from-parent. Teacher submits a homework which are normally an extension of the regular homework: Some math exercises, some videos to watch/kahnacademy (integration was smooth) some multiple choices exercises, or even just share with kids some exercises, that the kid can download, print, solve and send back to the school.. beside that the kids/parents have a channel to talk with the Teacher while they are all under partial lock-down, which without happens via mobile telephone (whatsapp, late in the night)

What would be the threat model here? Google would crawl the templates of the exercises and use it to fine tune their ads to the parents related with that content? NSA would know that Michael doesn't know that 4+4=8? Thinking about risk analysis, would you take this risk instead of invest taxpayer money? In my case in Germany, each State is coming up with their own solution, developing something which doesn't attend the minimum requirements (feature wise, privacy wise, supported platforms) and etc. For example one issue that we found in the last months: A lot of refugee kids have just a mobile telephone, but some solutions don't support it well. What do you think about usability? Totally wrong, Language Support? Just German (Yes many kids came to Germany and their parents don't speak German, how can they help their kids with something that they don't understand?), I could write hours about how wrong all evaluated solutions are.. And for sure their are not opening their source code, so how is it better?

Regarding Privacy, do you trust your data to your country more than you trust to Google? Maybe you do, but that's definitely not true for everyone or every country.

P.S: Look that my first statement and whole argumentation is based on the COVID-19 scenario and the issue that I'm raising is if any Country or State should be building their own similar solution with taxpayer money in a short amount of time.

Then they sit down at their first job and have to use Maya because it’s the standard and are behind. Or worse, can’t get a job because they’ve never used it.

You always have to wheigh things against each other. The people I am teaching study arts. They don't study to work in a studio, but to work on their own. Blender is a better fit for that than Maya here. If one of those students is really commuted to get a studio job learning Maya will be the smallest issue.

I earned my living with Blender as a VFX Freelancer (in Europe), so saying Maya is a must here is a bit outdated IMO.

Yeah, wish more educators had this point of view

> a common argument that schools should focus on pragmatism and working with what they have - the age-old argument that free software still is not accessible or easy to use

Ah yes, the "people use calculators in the real world so long division is a waste of time" argument

I have the privilege of participating in a religious education program using Canvas, and simultaneously the misfortune of using Google Classroom for secular school.

For two years my church class was taught by a single elderly volunteer, who I remember providing some simple tech support for during our weekly in person classes — she was not a technical person. But our regular online classes went smoothly, without a technical hitch that I can remember. This year we have a brand new teacher (who also has no prior experience using Canvas AFAIK) and 100% online classes (cause covid), and I had the pleasure of preventing our weekly synchronous classes from occurring via Zoom by recommending BigBlueButton. It has also worked flawlessly. And it pains me every time I have to switch between tabs for the Zoom malware and separate tools like Nearpod in secular school, when BigBlueButton has so much more education-focused functionality baked in.

So, while I believe there probably are free software solutions with insufficient support somewhere, my personal experience (as well as others’ anecdotes like those on BigBlueButtons homepage¹ or the MIT Professor/FSF member who teaches his class with purely free software², and the relatively empirical evidence that Canvas claim³) can’t attest to rumors of them being anything more than FUD.

1. https://bigbluebutton.org/ “Our instructors love BigBlueButton. With our previous web-conferencing solution our users encountered many technical and usability problems that caused a lot of support effort on our part. With BigBlueButton, the support issues are almost non-existent. We are constantly impressed with the level of quality in this open source project and it works without any prior knowledge. ” Marc Matthes Director of Computer Networking Programs and Program Developer, Distance Learning Department, Iowa Central Community College

2. (admittedly he isn’t anywhere near lacking in technical skill, and neither are his students, but on the other hand he was an early adopter during a high-stress time last Spring) https://www.gnu.org/education/teaching-my-mit-classes-with-o... “I am pleased to report that my classes were successfully presented, my students were well served, and we were all reasonably happy with the results.” Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He helped found the Free Software Foundation in 1985.

3. https://www.instructure.com/canvas/ “Canvas is the World's Fastest-Growing Learning Management Platform” “Over 30% of Higher Ed Institutions Choose Canvas”

I am uni prof.

I would say if the govt of a certain area mandated/encouraged free software usage, and also invested money into development (to fill in missing features) and support and training (to improve teacher skills), then things will work.

I agree that using libre software without support is difficult (my self-installed webwork server crashed during the quiz today).

Non-free software wins in the one arena where open source will never be able to compete: marketing dollars and advocacy. Nobody is going to visit a school, woo the principal, train the techs and hold their hands at the moment when it matters most: when the decision is made.

Once the school is in the boat the cost to switch is dramatic so from there on in the closed software vendor can let them suffer and move on to the next juicy target.

We went with Moodle because it was easier to setup and maintain. It also is much less stressful on the client computer. If you read the Canvas install, its pretty much another group who advertises open source but then has an installation procedure that truly sucks. Canvas wants you to pay for hosting. Moodle is super easy by comparison.

Mine went with Moodle and BigBlueButton, in my personal experience as a student and a teacher it's much better than WebEx, MS Teams, Fleep, Zoom (or similar) combined with Canvas, Google Classroom (or similar).

We went with Zoom because of peer-pressure. We tried a different vendor for video conferencing, but well, there is a lot of pressure to use zoom. I'm not real impressed, but they are basically the Windows of video conferencing.

I've worked with Canvas a bunch and concluded that they really don't care about open source. Maybe they did at one point when they were the underdog and it gave them an interesting edge. But now they will provide no support to help you run it yourself. The wiki pages outlining how to deploy are community-maintained and pretty frequently out of date. They're attempting to replace pieces (analytics and quizzing) with closed-source standalone applications.

You honestly can see the difference when a company gives a crap. For example, look at SpiceWorks in the ticket software area. Their directions are clear and easy. Heck, they have VM images.

My pragmatic suggestion is to use small OSs running on small hardware like a Raspberry Pi. You start with the terminal and end at GUIs.

Unfortunately, this disregards another aspect of a pragmatic picture, which is that to start off with, probably none of the teachers at a random school would even be able to open a terminal on some linux setup... Which leads us to... YouTube! Hmm. I think we are stuck again.

My primary and secondary school used Free Software extensively. They ran Ubuntu on all school laptops and everyone used LibreOffice. The web browser of choice was Firefox. The teachers recommended us to use LibreOffice at home too in order to have full compatibility for our assignments.

I spoke with the IT manager of the school and he's a real fan of open-source. He gave a talk at a open-source convention about it (in german)[0]. In this video he talks about how he convinced the local government to budget this, how it saved cost and much more.

I think this is a great example that this can work and more schools should try this out. From what I heard, the teachers didn't have too many problems and my classmats were quick to adopt without many problems. If I'm honest, I experience more problems with the Microsoft stack in my current school.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY47YY5BIGc

Out of curiosity: How did the pupils react to this environment? Where they annoyed or did they like it?

I think most didn't notice. Basically everyone in our class used their smartphone as primary computing device, only a few even have used laptops or computers at home. Those that did were quickly able to adapt and I only rarely heard complaints.

I've been in similar environments. Kids are flexible, resilient, and don't really notice things like this after a very short time. I was in a summer program in high school where we used Unix, and I think there was a one or two week curve before it was just in the background. In schools, kids put up with much more bizarre things. At the end of the day, they just come to understand that's what the world is.

in France most (if not every) public school uses OO/LO - and not since a couple years ago, it's been almost 15 years. Never heard of anyone having an issue with it.

My secondary school used Free Software exclusively.

In 1996.

That meant Debian on desktops (in classrooms, 486s with boot floppies and 10MB LAN mounting root over NFS and then XDMCP'ing over to a bigger X server; in the offices and computer labs, Pentiums with local installations, still sharing /home over NFS).

StarOffice was used for everything. We learned Perl in Grade 9 and had our own ~username websites. I ran a LambdaMOO.

I didn't realize how extraordinary this was until I visited a school with locked-down Windows NT 4.0 workstations and began to understand how amazing of a perk I had by having a computer teacher who pushed for this, against the wishes of more conventional teachers who wanted the safe option.

FVWM95 was a godsend in this regard - we could fool some people into thinking they were just on a weird variety of Windows.

I credit my career to this choice and wish I could find the teacher to thank him, but he has a John Smith tier name making him impossible to track down.

This school district in the USA almost exclusively uses Free Software:

TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8Co37GO2Fc&app=desktop

RedHat Video: https://youtu.be/Nj3dGK3c4nY

The IT Director there has also written a book: https://www.amazon.com/Open-Schoolhouse-Building-Technology-...

[Full Disclosure: He and I are good friends.]

I can't agree more with stallman. It pisses me off to no end that I was forced to learn autodesk in school, only to graduate and realizing nobody uses it in the real world. So why did my school pay to teach software nobody uses? Might as well used FreeCAD to teach the concepts.

I read this article a while ago, and made the decision to ban chromebooks in my house. I scored a couple cheap laptops, threw Ubuntu MATE on them, and told my kids to have fun, break it, fix it, do anything they want. I'm gonna raise admins, while the school raises ignorant complacent users

Autodesk is most certainly used by a huge variety of businesses for a multitude of purposes. Is it the only solution? No. But the school also likely got the software at a steep discount or free, exposing you, as a student, to CAD software in general. What tools you use following that are up to you, but the school did its job in teaching you a general skill that can be applied in a variety of other programs at will.

>What tools you use following that are up to you

For most, they're up to your employer. If everyone I interview knows AutoCAD because they all learned AutoCAD in college, I'm probably going to purchase AutoCAD. Companies provide those steep discounts to students because they want to condition you, not because it's good PR. And it's such an effective strategy that you never even have to consider that other programs exist, let alone that they could be worth your time.

Last time I worked with CAD people, solidworks was making inroads on autoCAD. It's a slow change industry.

It doesn't matter if autodesk gave it away in my opinion. As a user, you are contributing to software just by using it and talking about it, by reporting bugs, etc. In one case, all that feedback goes into making the proprietary software better, and when you get older, you are more willing to pay huge sums for it (like what apple did). In the other case, you make software better that benefits everyone, not just those that can afford 4 digit licensing fees.

Considering that, I have to agree it is unethical in this case to teach proprietary software

Wait do you mean autocad by autodesk? It is literally the software 99% of engineering companies use. That being said I agree with you on using free CAD software to teach such stuff.

To say that close to 99% use it is plain false. Having done research on the topic while writing a report for my old company when we were switching CAD packages, I can safetly say that Fusion360 and Solidworks make up an overwhelmingly majority of the market share. Some others include CATIA (used almost exclusively in the Aerospace sector), NX, BobCAD, Vectric Aspire, and Rhino3D. That's not to say AutoCAD (Autodesk are the company that makes the software afaik) isn't used; it's just dishonstest to imply that learning AutoCAD is all you need.

In my experience, solid works is the clear winner. I haven't had to use an autodesk product professionally until recently, and even then I'm working on transitioning to FreeCAD because it is more powerful than autocad (I can design something and write g-code in the same program to make it)

Autocad is such a shit product, I have to think the only reason it still exists is because engineers are stubborn and just stick with what they know. Autodesk knows this, which is why they are more than willing to give it away to schools.

Autodesk gives nearly all their products away to schools including Maya, Inventor and Revit. I do agree with the rest of your comment, in a roundabout way- the individuals who are willing to leave industry to become teachers have knowledge that is a decade or so behind usually.

This is still good, learning AutoCAD is better than learning no CAD for future engineers imo.

Fusion360 is Autodesk. Revit is Autodesk. Autodesk absolutely has a substantial portion of the marketshare, specific product not withstanding.

Youre going to see Fusion360 and Solidworks in fabrication, but people aren't designing building models in Solidworks.

In the context of free vs proprietary software, schools are not going to avoid Autodesk products, or they would be outputting people who arent familiar with the industry standard tools. In a collaborative environment, when firms are sharing drawings, standardization of product is going to arise. Even if AutoCAD isnt the best product, it is entrenched for a while longer, and more than likely Autodesk owns the replacement firms will choose when the time comes. Schools will adapt accordingly.

Architecture is but a small corner in the world of engineering and applications for CAD.

While it is true that you can't avoid autodesk completely, you can no problem until at least second year in college. There is zero reason a high school can't avoid autodesk, and as educators they should.

I agree with your philosophy, but I'm interested in why specifically Chromebooks are banned (and did you only ban chromebooks or did you ban everything that isn't free?). Especially with the newest chromebooks, it's cake to install anything in the Debian repos. It's also worth noting that the vast majority of ChromeOS is also open source.

I'm more curious because I banned Windows and Apple (at least if I'm paying for it), but I let the Chromebooks stay. My son has learned a lot about Linux and life on the CLI getting Minecraft to run in the Debian container on our Chromebook.

Stallman's TED talk had a profound impact on me. I think he is right, but realistically, it would be extremely difficult to take it to the extreme that he suggests. The best I can do is eliminate what I can and keep learning so I can do more. I've only been a full time Linux user for 3 years, but in that time I've learned how powerful it is, and can't help but think, if I started on this two decades ago, I'd be even more powerful in the real world than I already am.

I recognize all the contributions Google has made, and overall I think they are a lot better than other companies, but at the end of the day they are a company and their end goal is making money and not always what is best for my kids and society in general. I tried wiping chromeOS and putting Linux on, but the whole container thing annoyed me and reminded me of the PS3.. At any minute, Google can kill this functionality. So I opted to drop it completely in favor of old thinkpads and ubuntu.

If your kids like Minecraft, I cannot suggest enough the "learning Python with minecraft" book and optionally the Udemy course for teaching kids python. In 3 months, both my 8 and 10 year old are building skyscrapers with a few lines of code. It has been a huge creative outlet for them. Bonus if you have them do it on a raspberry pi

> If your kids like Minecraft, I cannot suggest enough the "learning Python with minecraft" book and optionally the Udemy course for teaching kids python

Thank you, I will check it out! I just retired and older Pi from production that would be perfect for this actually...

CAD is a bad place to make this argument. FreeCAD is the closest thing to commercial 3D parametric CAD, and it is still missing some key features. Further, teaching FreeCAD to engineering students would be a detrimental; the engineering profession that students graduate into has no appetite for open source CAD

I'm talking about what to teach in school. FreeCAD does a lot, and it has gotten a LOT better recently. You could do things in FreeCAD that would cost thousands in other packages. For most of school, this is enough. When it comes time for CFD and FEA, there are tools better than FreeCAD, but not for long if FreeCAD had the user base the other tools get from schools

Does FreeCAD handle constrained assemblies yet? You can't kneecap students while making the argument that their participation will make the tool better for someone else, maybe, in the future.

Yes, it does, admittedly not as smooth as solidworks. FreeCAD has come a LONG way recently. With more users, it will just get better and better.

Suppose it doesn't though, I don't agree that it is knee capping students. My school started teaching CAD in 10th grade, and at that point you are just learning the basics like GD&T, so it isnt that important if the CAD package can make 1000 part assemblies and sub assemblies. You can teach all the basics with FreeCAD, no problem

All the assembly workbenches are external, doesn't count in my mind.

You're right, FreeCAD can handle the basics nicely. I was coming at this with my experience from university, where I don't think FreeCAD is good enough yet.

I want FreeCAD to be better; I financially support the development in a small way.

It pisses me off to no end that I was forced to learn autodesk in school, only to graduate and realizing nobody uses it in the real world. So why did my school pay to teach software nobody uses? Might as well used FreeCAD to teach the concepts.

How is this relevant? Yes, your school should teach you the software that will be useful to you outside academia.

If anything, this idea seems counter to Stallman's has hard line stance.

> I'm gonna raise admins, while the school raises ignorant complacent users

This was my favourite comment here. And it captures the participatory essence of the Stallman article. But nowhere on this page of comments did I see the concept of "digital literacy" mentioned - and how schools that do not bring at least a critical discussion to their choice of OS/SaaS/PaaS etc are failing and behind the times. If this discussion is not happening in schools, where is it going to happen?

Lots of mention on this page went to how much/whether programming knowledge is needed for the free/open software. To this discussion, and to return to the comment at the incipit, even the smallest offering of access to coding can - through experience (to get all John Deweyean here) - transform students from users into makers. A very basic example would be the difference between the Google Classroom UI and a wiki interface (PM wiki, Doku wiki) which by default puts more emphasis on the student and their collaborative role.

And Dewey noted (Problems of Men, 1946, p.61) that it is society's loss if the educational system is not providing ample opportunity for students to discover their voice and where their talent lies. In conclusion, the passivity involved in using certain apps further blocks the potential for interdisciplinary exploration, in at least one or two class components. But here I am giving a poor man's rendition of Engelbart's vision.

Re: which CAD to use...

I work in a +1$B company in AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) and our designers and engineers use AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor, 3DSMax, KeyShot, Unity, Solidworks, Rhino, SketchUp, plus the entire Adobe Suite. The Autodesk tools represent probably 75% of the install base.

I agree that learning the concepts is more important on where and what to click in any particular software set. But in AEC, Autodesk is king.

At my university, we are heavily dependent upon Microsoft. The reasoning is that it has more features than the open source equivalents. It was pointed out that the over $1 million a year given to Microsoft could be used to implement those features in the open source tools and it wouldn't take long to get there. That was in the 1990's. We now give Microsoft many more millions a year and have ever since.

Who would do that implementation? Who would manage it? Who would lead it?

Anyone willing to get $1 million.

That doesn’t get you very far. Maybe a small team of developers for a year. But, maintenance and hosting cost more.

Most of free software is supported gratis. You do not need full support, just specific things for your use case.

Anybody willing to get $1 million '90s dollars. They probably spend more now.

And maybe you still don't know how many millions they give to the software houses to use their statistical packages :)

> It was pointed out that the over $1 million a year given to Microsoft could be used to implement those features in the open source tools and it wouldn't take long to get there.

$1 million to implement the features sure, but what about actually hosting and administering the open source software? On call engineers aren't cheap and it's going to break on finals week.

Don't most universities host their own software?

It’s a mix. Current ERP solutions for higher ed are offered self-hosted or SaaS. Ancillary solutions are moving quickly towards SaaS only. Larger R1 schools are more likely to have solutions they built entirely in-house. Most schools have highly customized versions of COTS products.

Source: I work for a leading supplier of those solutions.

I’m not sure about most, perhaps some do but the ones I’m aware of are using Office365 or similar.

A few years ago they did, but Google, Microsoft, and some of the cloud LMS companies have started to shift them onto the cloud.

As someone who had a university IT dept as a client, it's honestly much better for the school. University IT is almost universally a disaster and bottleneck.

LMS we still host (Moodle), but student registration is just cheaper and easier to get a company to host (We use Empower).

I've noticed even the strapped for money TCUs have hosted LMS more often than not. We went against the grain on that one.

Office365 is just so cheap for students (The e-mail is free if you just use that) that it makes total sense to pick that.

I was going to say this. Developing an LMS or really any tool is not cheap. You would be saving $1M/yr from MS but paying out $2M/yr in dev costs.

You do not necessarily need to hire these devs yourself, though. It can be managed by the legal entity overseeing regular development, like the LibreOffice foundation.

And Microsoft just keeps using that money to constantly rewrite their own software for no apparent reason these days. It's like the worst of bazaar development (cascade of attention deficit teenagers in full glory) and propietary software (you can't no longer support it when the teenagers abandon it).

We are still waiting for Teams to support features that Lync/SFB supported on day 1. But that does not prevent them from trying to force Teams onto O365 users (by all but abandoning SFB).

The alternative to most proprietary software is absolutely not "build it ourselves". Whatever your school is/was using Microsoft for is not a $1M/year expense. It might not even be doable for $100M/year.

You have to spread the costs across multiple orgs and hundreds of programmers. You can do that by paying a centralized institution for proprietary software or by joining an open-source project.

If there is no open-source project, you have to create one, and then you're potentially years away from getting something that's a true alternative.

If schools don't like proprietary licenses, they should bargain together for something better.

> Whatever your school is/was using Microsoft for is not a $1M/year expense. It might not even be doable for $100M/year.

so how come the university i've been (Bordeaux, ~55k students / 3k staff) almost exclusively uses Linux and free software and does not have a computing budget in the hundred thousands ?

You're refuting a point I did not make.

I was responding to someone who suggested that schools should build their own critical software. If there's a good FOSS option already, they should absolutely use it. But there isn't always that option.

Also, I guarantee that the school has at least 5-10 tech people, which means computing expenses are approaching $1M when you factor in benefits. Free software requires a larger in-house staff to customize and maintain it, even if the initial cost is low.

> their own critical software.

which critical software are those ?

To play the devil’s advocate - I reckon it’s all to do with support. If something breaks they can just pick up the phone and tell them to sort it out. What will they do when a random open source program breaks? Open a github issue?

I’m also sure deals like that come with other goodies, for example, my university offered free, licensed windows, office & visual studio installations.

Also, electronics course had windows-only software that we all had to use.

I’m sure it’s not that easy to switch. There must be deals on deals upon deals depending on where the school budget comes from and who approves it and so on.

This point is lost on stallmanists. They still live with assumption that every user is a programmer or at least very interested in _controlling_ the software. No. Majority just want to use the software for whatever they need it to. Writers just want to write books, digital artists just want to paint, etc.

You can call me a "stallmanist" if you like, but this point has been explained many times in the essays of Stallman. In short: No one has to be a programmer. Free software allows you to hire anyone to work on your software, just like with car repairs.

In the words of neil stephenson:

"If your tank breaks down, we'll send engineers to your house to fix it for you while you sleep!"

Proprietary software support is a lie. Arlo is so incompetent, they can't even bill me. Seriously. I go to buy something in their app, and it gives me an error. I file a support ticket, say I have money and I want to buy something. Tell multiple people via web and phone that I want to buy something but the interface is broken. It's been about a month now. I just checked. It's still broken. They really dont give a shit their billing system is broken. These people are clowns.

> I reckon it’s all to do with support. If something breaks they can just pick up the phone and tell them to sort it out.

You must have a very different experience with getting support for proprietary software than I do.

You can spend four- and five-figures per seat per year on CAD software, and still only get canned responses suggesting you uninstall and reinstall. You can license Google Docs for 2000 employees, doesn't mean you can get a single easily reproducible bug fixed.

If you don't buy support for software, you're the support team.

Maybe that's something a savvy teacher is willing to take on for a small, advanced class where the students largely know what they're doing, or at least have a reasonable baseline of prior education.

It certainly doesn't scale when we're talking school wide software, tiny IT teams and dozens of thousands of students & and hundreds of faculty of varying levels of computer literacy all bringing their own devices.

I guess it depends on if you have a strong enough IT team to provide that support or not. I doubt many schools, or even large corporations do.

The #1 platform in schools is Google.

Google doesn't provide support either.

Or to be specific, there is a support email with obnoxious, egoistic minimum wage drones who make Comcast look great. There are all sorts of broken self-serve automated systems too. Empowered employees capable of understanding what they're talking about? They do their best to shield them from customers.

Google stuff mostly works. When it doesn't, you're mostly SOL. It's like that even if you pay for the fancy enterprise stuff.

Microsoft has support. They're also nowhere close to being the #1 platform in schools. Apple has support. Ditto.

My goal would be to provide open source educational software with paid support and hosted options at an affordable price point.

From what I've seen recently, the school district and board really work hard towards providing the best educational product at the lowest cost. For example, switching hardware from a Windows laptop to a Chromebook meant we saved money on both the hardware contracts and support. But justifying $20k+ for the cost of a software license for a HR module in the educational equivalent of PeopleSoft is harder, even when the district has projected that we will save more than the cost of the software in the long run.

If you don't pay for support, you will get what you paid for. This is orthogonal to whether the software is Free or non-Free.

If you've ever heard of Red Hat, they were a Free software support organization that became an international success story with a multi-billion-dollar valuation. They are not the only ones out there.

In short, what they'd do if there's a problem is pick up the phone to whoever is contracted to provide support service, and expect support.

Free software isn’t really free, it requires a team of software developers to maintain the self hosted servers that it’s running on. School budgets are pretty stretched, if they can get away with free OneDrive or gDrive, and the associated cloud suite of software, that doesn’t mean they can drop in libre-office and whatever cloud software is free.

Free as in freedom and not as in free beer

Any idea why not to use 'freedom' term instead of 'free' and explaining it again and again. Freedom Software Foundation Freedom software etc ... What prevents renaming?

Just speaking for myself, the bad grammar of "freedom software" kills it right away for me :-)

The word 'freedom' is itself highly politically charged in a certain very influential country. It has various context-dependent nuances best left undisturbed outside of targeted party-political discourse.

When we talk about free software, we're already explicitly invoking "free as in freedom" though. If you want to avoid the " freedom" rhetoric then you should talk about open-source instead.

I prefer "freedom-respecting software" myself. It parses better.

Have you heard the expression "Freedom isn't free"? People aren't saying "Liberty isn't liberty", they're saying "Liberty isn't free of charge." Similarly, this person is saying "Libre software isn't free of charge." You're not informing them of something they didn't know.

I don't think that was ever the claim that it will never cost the school money to run their computers. The money instead will go to consultants, or some company like Collabora that maintains the LibreOffice installation. (Note: Microsoft or Google could easily bid on this consulting work if they wanted)

The 'free' I believe is like the Spanish 'libre', not like 'gratis'. Put another way, it's free as in 'freedom', not free as in 'beer'.

"Free as in speech, not free as in beer"

>> Free software isn’t really free, it requires a team of software developers to maintain the self hosted servers that it’s running on

Free (libre) software isn't necessarily free (gratis) either. Stallman isn't against people being compensated for providing a service, he's against licenses and business models that restrict what you're allowed to do with stuff, especially after you've paid for it. And paid software doesn't really eliminate the need for trained (non-gratis) administration personnel and additional management infrastructure either.

As usual I think the absolute of what Stallman's saying here isn't very pragmatic, but the way many schools depend entirely on massive Microsoft contracts isn't really pragmatic either. My school paid a huge amount of money for these huge accounts with Microsoft. And I saw a lot of students leave school with a heavy dependence on Microsoft. I on the other hand, also completed virtually all of my assignments on a tiny Linux netbook using OpenOffice / LibreOffice that cost me a fraction of what everyone else was using. And even as someone who loves the idea of running `git clone` for software I use to make little tweaks? I never once in 4 years found a reason to do that for OpenOffice or LibreOffice.

Are those Microsoft contracts really worth it for places that have limited funding and a charter to provide education for the broadest good? I'd absolutely agree there's cases where it's better for the school to simply purchase something quick that solves their problem. I wouldn't have a problem with that. But most of the arguments I hear against even considering the alternatives just sound like resistance to change for the sake of it.

There is another point hidden there. You can use free software in schools just fine. What happens when kids leave the schools? They will face MS Office or Google Docs. Maybe the idea there is that those kids then push to replace those with Libre Office, but that's a pipe dream. So they will have to learn those non-free products. And given that only minority learn the concepts not what exactly which button to push, there will be a lot of unhappy people in the offices.

>> So they will have to learn those non-free products. And given that only minority learn the concepts not what exactly which button to push, there will be a lot of unhappy people in the offices.

If your standard for educational institutions is to learn how to push specific buttons and be unable to learn new software, then they will be failing miserably. And not just because, as you point out in your comment, not every company uses the same office suite. By your standard, using MS Office is already a pragmatic failure for students who go somewhere where they use Google Docs.

No, it is not my standart for education institutions. And (I hope) it is not a standard to teach. Alas, it is standard thing for people to learn. And, sadly enough, thi applies in all the areas. Concepts are hard, let's go shopping. I see it all the time in somewhat techincal hobbies: not many care about what's happening at the concept level, they just want a button to push and get the result. If that button is moved, there is a trouble.

Your arguments apply to all office suites. Not free ones. I'm not sure what you're trying to suggest schools should do here.

The reason everything outside of school uses those products is that the workforce is trained to use them.

Yes. Ant there is a thing called inertia. Feel free to fight it.

Yeah see my previous comment, "But most of the arguments I hear against even considering the alternatives just sound like resistance to change for the sake of it." Poor arguments. If a lot of businesses start using Google Docs, shouldn't schools abandon Office?

> that cost me a fraction of what everyone else was using

Nowadays even MS Office is free for everyone in the Office 365 org, so kids today won't pay until they leave their school and need a home license (and that's if they don't work somewhere that uses Office 365 as well, allowing them to install it on their home machine).

> on a tiny Linux netbook using OpenOffice / LibreOffice that cost me a fraction of what everyone else was using (emphasis added)

I read it as referring to the hardware. Linux runs inside many SD cards and can run on a ~$3 business card (as well as running on most supercomputers, stock exchanges, the ISS, SpaceX rockets and many cars, etc.)

I meant it to refer to both. I had a lot of peers who were using recent MacBooks and would often buy software for their projects. I know many of them used Microsoft Office on their macs too - but whether they could get that free of charge at the time is unknown to me.

Yes but free software lives on and a new team can drive product updates if the original team abadons it.

I know this is hard for some to grasp - but not everyone wants to learn how to code! I have no problem advocating that when teaching about computers open source software makes sense.

However, blanket advocation that there is zero value in proprietary software is just plain nuts and bordering on religious zealotry. Life is about balance; extremes are rarely useful - especially long term.

You don't have to learn to code to use FOSS.

> Life is about balance; extremes are rarely useful - especially long term.

This is the moderation fallacy.

> This is the moderation fallacy.

Yeah? Go on...

Without elaboration it sounds like the fallacy fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

Fallacy fallacy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

Yeah, that just didn't happen here.

Pessimizer pointed out the moderation fallacy. For an argument from fallacy to have happened, he would have needed to use that to invalidate some conclusion from that argument.

Free software has value far beyond just computing education. Whether you want to learn to code or not, there’s a distinctly asymmetric power relationship that you inevitably end up in if you use proprietary software.

Think about the pervasive data collection you see in many mainstream applications and devices now: smart TVs perform content recognition to try and figure out what you’re watching, VR headsets track much of what you do in VR and report back to the manufacturer, mobile apps look for information that can be used to identify users across apps to aggregate data about their users. Do you think these kinds of things would be so widespread if we were all using free software?

Sure, not everyone is a programmer, but those of us who are could inspect the software and patch out all the tracking code. Even without that, though, I think the additional transparency would make companies less likely to do things like this.

"there’s a distinctly asymmetric power relationship that you inevitably end up in if you use proprietary software."

Yes, all proprietary software vendors are stereotypical mustache twirling villains.

This is the kind of overheated rhetoric that causes people to tune out open source advocates.

Also I don't need open source software to see that vendors have tracking code. I also don't have to use their software. I have yet to hook a smart TV up to the internet and have zero intention of ever doing so. A lot of people hook up smart TVs to the Internet because it's the easiest path to get to the Netflix app. You think they are going to swap out the code on their TV even if it was a choice? That's delusional. It would be far easier for them to just plug in an Apple TV if privacy is a top concern - but sadly for most people privacy isn't a concern.

As for VR headsets they are such a niche case, other than us nerds it's not even on the mainstream radar. And once it gets to a point where it is more mainstream there will no doubt be companies like Apple making a big deal about Privacy being a key differentiator for them. So yeah, you might have a quicker path if everything was open source and you had the capability to do it yourself, but open source is hardly the ONLY path to get these results.

>Yes, all proprietary software vendors are stereotypical mustache twirling villains.

I didn't say they were all evil or malicious. I said there is an asymmetric power relationship. This is true whether or not you trust the vendor. You might! But it's good to be aware of it nonetheless, and to think about:

- How much do you trust them?

- Are they incentivized to keep your data safe and private?

- Do you think you'll still be able to trust them 5 years from now?

To varying degrees, the platform owner has a significant say over your use of the platform. It's more pronounced the more locked-down the platform is, but for example: if Apple doesn't want you to run some software on iOS, it's going to be very difficult for you to run that software. If Microsoft decides to push an update to Windows that adds more intrusive telemetry, you have little choice; Windows is going to force an update and you're going to get that telemetry whether you like it or not.

>Also I don't need open source software to see that vendors have tracking code.

You don't necessarily, but it's a hell of a lot easier to tell if you can see the source code.

>You think they are going to swap out the code on their TV even if it was a choice? That's delusional. It would be far easier for them to just plug in an Apple TV if privacy is a top concern - but sadly for most people privacy isn't a concern.

Just looked up the current top-selling TVs on Amazon, this one[0] is currently #1, selling for $130. Adding an Apple TV to the mix ($150 for the base model) would more than double that cost. You, me, and probably most people on this site can easily afford that - but for a lot of people that's a more difficult choice.

Yes, I absolutely believe that some people would replace applications on their TVs with alternatives with less surveillance - possibly many people, if the process were easy.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/TCL-32S325-Inch-720p-Smart/dp/B07G9XZ...

> Yes, all proprietary software vendors are stereotypical mustache twirling villains.

Markets force businesses to act in certain ways. You're making the fallacy of assigning personal malice to normal organizational dynamics. The goal of a good regulatory regime is to have businesses operate in the public good (from a 100,000 foot view).

Yes, if we legalized slavery, we'd have slaves and plantations again. If we legalized arbitrary pollution, businesses would kill the environment. If we got rid of employee safety protections, people would start losing limbs. It's a free market economy. That's what happens. If I produce a product for a buck less than you, I'll stay in business and you won't. That drives low prices and high efficiency, and then regulations constrain that to prevent those from happening.

My own opinion is that anything which isn't open ought to have a 2% sales tax on it. If my microwave ships with source code, mechanical, and electrical schematics, Walmart can sell if for $49. If not, they can sell it for $50. I think that's actually enough to push the economy to where everything which can reasonably be open becomes open. Mice, keyboard, printers -- all the basic stuff.

And the stuff where closed is the secret sauce would stay closed.

> A lot of people hook up smart TVs to the Internet because it's the easiest path to get to the Netflix app. You think they are going to swap out the code on their TV even if it was a choice? That's delusional.

However, if they have a programmer friend with relevant experience, they can get the programmer to do it for them. Furthermore, the change can be shared, so all it takes is for one person to do it for everyone to have it-- all it takes is one person for social good.

Furthermore, the argument that software is hard to modify in practice is meaningless, because Free Software might lead to business models and software engineering techniques that empower users more in this way, because granting more practical freedom is better. It's like how some businesses offer APIs

> Life is about balance; extremes are rarely useful - especially long term.

Well, you shouldn't commit genocide, but to say you shouldn't kill just a few dozen people? I mean, why be a zealot about this whole murder thing?

The right choice is rarely exactly in the middle. Life isn't about balance. Life is about doing what's best, and sometimes that's in the middle, but more often than not, it's at one extreme or the other.

Schools seem so fundamental to creating the fabric of society, to me. To have a school system under the contractual obligations of a company, whos common primary incentive is wholly financial, seems like a good way to weaken the mechanisms that produce a good, happy society.

Free software does indeed seem like a good thing to require in our society-cornerstone systems: schools, hospitals, government systems etc.

So we've had nationwide government schooling in the United States for a bit over a hundred years at this point. Would you say that those schools have created a "good, happy" fabric of society?

As compared to the time before free public education? As a black person I'll say that it's not great now, but definitely better than the 1920s for anyone in my family. As southern sharecroppers, we were pretty much serfs.

This is a "It was cold today ergo global warming is a hoax" style of argument.

Experiencing a a slight dip does not mean that the general trend has not been good.

Or to put it in a way more people will understand: Society is going to moon, so buy the dip and hodl on.

The same would apply not only to software, but all copyrighted/patented objects. Surely you don't advocate forgoing those, so why is software different?

Most of the arguments for Free Software do not apply to other copyrighted/patented objects, but it's still worth considering the analogy.

Many of the books studied in schools are copyrighted and deny the freedom to distribute (Freedom 2), or to distribute modified versions (Freedom 3). Books aren't the same as software though. Unlike a book, software does stuff. It can act against your interests. There are many ways proprietary software can be harmful, [0] few of which apply to non-Free books.

It's the same reason the FSF have a strong position that game engines should be Free Software, but they aren't too concerned if game assets (maps, textures, music, etc) are paywalled and non-Free. A texture can't do harm in the way executable code can (not counting malicious textures that exploit security vulnerabilities).

(Incidentally this is the current licensing situation for DOOM and Quake. The engines are Free and Open Source Software, but the game assets are paywalled and non-Free.)

Studying patented technologies might not always be a mistake, as it may represent the state of the art, and still be worth studying. I believe the NOTAR helicopter technology is patented, for instance, but it's still worth teaching to aeronautical engineering students. [1] Again, the issues there aren't the same as the issues with non-Free software. The issue of companies paying schools to teach their solutions, is a different matter.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAR

What worries me is who's going to bear the torch when Stallman is done. Yeah I understand that he is mostly a notional head now, but cant imagine another person with a comparable voice and reach.

Time will tell how well the new guy, Knauth, does. [0]

The easy bit will be to not repeat Stallman's faults. Stallman would often come across as pedantic and combative in the Q&A session at the end of a talk, for instance, and would say absurd things such as that people who make proprietary software should be imprisoned.

[0] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/statement-from-fsfs-new-...

I think his absurdities and hardlines were a necessity. Had he been more amenable to compromise I doubt FSF would have been able to push the agenda into that tiny sliver of mainstream that it managed to.

Keeping fingers crossed about Knauth.

With pain in my heart I just installed MS Office on my son's laptop because he needs it for school (free on a license from school fortunately). I thought it was stupid because LibreOffice. He thought it was stupid because Google Docs, which his primary school used.

I particularly find it stupid because Open Document Format is what students should be using, not some proprietary format.

Thing is, schools want to teach, not maintain software. And many companies offer attractive ways for schools to provide their students with the software they need. Someone should do the same with Free Software, make sure it works perfectly, and then call every single school to convince them to use this instead of Microsoft or Google. And then schools will still prefer the system that everybody else is using and has proven itself.

Next time you can always have your son install it on his laptop, maybe he'll start exploring other options.

This is hopelessly idealistic. It might make sense for some particular general purpose applications, e.g. Office -> LibreOffice, but at the college level there are simply not suitable free alternatives for many proprietary software packages. Additionally, many potential employers specifically want graduates with experience with those proprietary packages, so not providing them with that experience handicaps them relative to graduates from other schools that do provide that experience.

Public Education is where you learn stuff like science, math, writing, literature. It is not where you learn how to use the current version of Microsoft office that will be obsolete in 5 years.

Anyone who is computer literate can likely be trained to use a particular software package by their employer. This is especially true when their particular company is liable to use a fair bit of very specific applications/web applications to manage the company's particular business.

It is impossible and pointless to worry about whether high school graduates know particular software packages when there are many and varied different choices for any industry and so many industries to pick from.

Higher ed should still be about the subject matter not once again particular soon to be obsolete versions of whatever software is common in their industry.

When you spend 4-10 years learning a topic being 6 hours behind another applicant doesn't seem much like a handicap.

The FSF recently created a petition to promote free software in schools: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/sign-this-petition-for-f...

"We'll get in touch with their administration on your behalf, and let them know that a global community of activists and everyday people alike have signed a statement in support of free software in education."

Sure, but how does this solve the problems that schools have? The problems that are currently being solved well enough now by the likes of Google and Microsoft? If the FSF wants this to succeed, they need to demonstrate and convince school districts that Free Software can meet their needs with costs they can afford. It would help their position if they could show a school district that has successfully gone in this direction.

They do something somewhat along those lines https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-cases.html#content https://www.gnu.org/education/successful-resistance-against-....

But I think the FSF would rather focus on ideals, absolute purity, and technical stuff like LibreJS tagging than do marketing for the impure populist Ubuntus of the education world (like Canvas) that already have corporations to do that (like Instructure, kind of like Canvas’ Canonical).

The day before our kinder's and second grader's school started we got a message from the teacher that they were changing the software to be used for remote teaching at the last moment. This sounded very strange so we googled the company name, Acellus. It turns out the curriculum is filled with racist and sexist content. I do not believe this would have happened if using FOSS.

https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/08/hawaii-schools-dump-distan...

lol - just look at the code of conduct fiasco with Linux over the last year or so. If you think FOSS is immune from ideological injection your deluding yourself.

I do not believe FOSS elementary curriculum would have racist and sexist content.

That's a nice belief, but there is nothing special with FOSS that would prevent it. Majority rules when there is no hierarchical structure - for example the amount of politically motivated editorializing in Wikipedia makes whole swaths of it highly questionable - article content is driven by the largest tribe, not facts.

The fact that it is open makes replacing content trivial. Try replacing the content of the proprietary solution mentioned and let us know how it goes.

It's not about majority rules–it is about openness. I'm not concerned if a single person controls the content or a large community ruled by the majority. What matters to me is that the content is publicly available for all to see and review.

With open curriculum parents can look at what is being taught and make a decision based on the content. In a closed system this is not possible. The only reason Acellus became an issue this year was because someone on twitter took a picture of their child's lesson and luckily the media picked up on it.

I'm happy to see that Academia has embraced Python the past years. When I went to college, almost every science class which required coding / scripting used MATLAB. Luckily stats classes either used R or Octave, but MATLAB was generally heads above anything else, in terms of usage.

I have observed that some businesses and groups, that sprung out of Academia, still heavily use MATLAB. I guess that's logical - as their users come from MATLAB-heavy environments.

But still, it kinda sucks because:

- MATLAB is still proprietary, and costs money

- The larger the codebase becomes, the more incentive there is to stick with MATLAB

- You somewhat limit yourself on potential candidates that can (or WANT) to work with MATLAB.

The only true benefits I see from using proprietary languages like MATLAB, would be very specific and optimized packages / libraries, along with good support...but then again, being dependent on vendors for updates is rarely a comfortable experience.

I have used MATLAB extensively. I exclusively use python these days. I would say in terms of quality MATLAB is 8.5/10 and python is like a 6.5.

I am always searching google to fix something not working on python. In matlab, just refer to the docs.

I would say the exact opposite. I found MATLAB painful to work with at university. Using python for everything after that has been a breath of fresh air.

I work in an industry R&D group. We're a Python shop, for the most part. I've noticed that when we hire recent graduates, it pretty much doesn't matter if they've used MATLAB or Python. If they're likely to become good coders, then they come up to speed on Python equally quickly.

If not, then MATLAB tends to have more canned apps that they can use as-is or modify, but they're also unlikely to get deeply into computational work anyway.

My daughter took a college class that involved some programming, and they were told that they could use the tool of their choice, MATLAB, Python, whatever. I suggested: Use whatever the teacher is using, which happened to be MATLAB.

A benefit of MATLAB is that for basic use, it all comes from one place, and there's pretty much exactly one way to set it up. This practically eliminates the day wasted getting the tools working on each student's computer.

With Python, unless you give them strict instructions to use a particular repository such as Anaconda, or an online tool, they will discover a myriad of blogs with conflicting advice on how to get Python running, with the most opinionated having the worst advice.

With that said, so long as I've followed a consistent recipe for getting Python onto a computer, It's always been great. I've been quite happy with WinPython.

Regarding the part about wasting time on setting up stuff - because I've been plagued with that on every laptop I've used (due to conflicting/competing software and DLL hell):

repl.it or google colab.

Won't work offline, but it takes 5 seconds from launch/load to coding. Those tools are a godsend. I haven't opened an IDE or touched Conda for Python in probably 3 months now.

What I'm learning, at least from my kids, is that students are always online when they're doing anything with a computer. So, they are typically comfortable with using online tools.

>> Proprietary software rejects their thirst for knowledge: it says, “The knowledge you want is a secret—learning is forbidden!” Proprietary software is the enemy of the spirit of education, so it should not be tolerated in a school, except as an object for reverse engineering.

Myself, as the creator of the most widely-used K-12+ software of the 90s and early 2000s, HyperStudio, can say that nothing in that statement is true about the software that I created then, before, nor afterwards.

Good point, and I appreciate your outstanding work and respect the fact that developers have to eat, too.

One could still make a point over whether learning how your product works internally is kind of a secret when the child can’t look at the source code, can’t tinker with it to add features and can’t share that knowledge with others.

Well schools should do both and learn skills that are easily transferable. Show options, but not deny any out right option.

That is the theory. Often program for pupils is written by some dude in capital who gets a slice of the pie. Or is not competent enough to know that there is free software.

It is a vicious circle if you have super good education system your country grows if not you go to shits.

I'm not an expert but I think that the better education system is the better prospects for future in any given country is.

When I was in primary school all we learned was MS-DOS + Norton Commander :D In high school we had some of the Windows 95 stuff, Word and ofc all the way since later primary to end of highschool Turbo Pascal.

This is the wrong perspective. The perspective should be on governments taking that role and use educational funds to generate commons. There are several issues around making all this work, but the key issue is scale: an individual school has no capacity to decide or handle that, they can only choose what works. It's at regional or national level that there's sufficient scale.

At the same time can an education system set up software etc that rivals the effectiveness of professional and smooth software? Sometimes easier than contract than to try and create/adapt aomehtknf yourself

I came here to say much the same about textbooks.

In the case of textbooks not much has changed with middle school algebra in the past 100+ years, but we are still paying >$100 a textbook (these days ebooks!) for books which can be found with a google search. In many cases because the free books are missing some fine tuning an individual state wants to make.

In the us we have "common core" in a lot of states, and if there is a problem with a free e-book, they should have hired someone to fix it rather than paying the big publishing books orders of magnitude more money for book rentals.

Similarly with software, maybe the commercial offerings are better this year, but we should be _investing_ in open solutions rather than paying rent to large corporations only interested in profiteering in the education sector.

But those companies, and the lack of widespread political will makes it generally infeasable for any single school district to create a "google classroom" (or whatever). A few states getting together and putting wording in the procurement process that say that commercial offerings which are based on free software are preferred, and where solutions fall short, a small fraction of the payment to the commercial offering needs to be redirected as investment in open software.

The goal is to create Redhat type organizations that improve and support free software offerings, rather than proprietary solutions which cannot be afforded by the smaller or economically disadvantaged districts.

This argument seems to rely heavily on the idea that non-free software is unethical. If you’re already bought into that idea, then clearly schools ought to only use free software. If you’ve not bought into it already, there’s nothing here that’s likely to change your mind.

It's not just ethically wrong. There are also practical implications: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...

Maybe so. I disagree with much of Stallman’s platform. But regardless of that, I was just observing that the arguments offered in the article in addition to the rest of the dialogue about free vs proprietary software are mostly based on the idea of a moral or ethical imperative behind free software, and relies on an existing body of work to make arguments about why that imperative might exist. Since the article doesn’t attempt to justify the existence of that imperative, it mostly serves as a statement of position, rather than an argument that’s likely to win anybody over who isn’t already on board with the idea.

Would it be viable to start with 100% free software and build a business that sells it as a service to schools?

That way training and etc would be available and etc?

When I think of it that way and my son's elementary school the sheer volume of changes and additions and ... I duno that seems like a HUGE lift to get them anywhere near where they are now in terms of features, ease of use, administration, etc.

I like the philosophy here, I just don't know if it is possible to get anywhere near the same level of features and etc.

This is the freedom business model. Share the software, spend time supporting users, charge for support. SQLite is public domain. Think about that.

I'm just thinking in the sense of scale of what you have to do ... just to get to where someone wants to buy it is pretty huge.

Share the software. Sell services. Workshops, installations, consultations, support. Use money from sale of services to continue service. Repeat. Get some charismatic people to go door to door, splash around some booze and joy with top decision makers at large institutions. With friends in high places, suddenly there's no shortage of clients wanting to run free software and pay for your services.

It also takes the piss right out of proprietary software's only competitive selling point: being able to call someone to fix your broken software for you.

My point is that I think the mountain of changes / features required is pretty high if you're cobbling free software together to create something someone at a school will buy, before you can even make a sale.

I'm also not sure schools or non tech focused businesses really think THAT much about just calling some rando to fix their software. That's a whole other process that isn't easy / sure to do the thing you want.

I dont understand what youre saying. An organization like the fsf or debian clearly has the resources to do outreach and supplant microsoft. There is already massive demand in countries outside the united states to replace microsoft.

It's very simple and doable. I just don't have time right now. Busy doing other things. But if I had nothing else on the radar, I would totally try to run that game.

I really don't think FSF or debian is in a position to support schools when it comes to their needs.

I just don't think what fsf or Debian wants to do = what an educational institution needs.

> cobbling free software together to create something someone at a school will buy

IDK what you’re talking about, 30% of higher education already runs Canvas (and it claims to be the fastest growing LMS) as one example (and it’s competing with Free software like Moodle).

In fact the exact opposite seems to be the case: I see teachers cobbling together proprietary Zoom with Nearpod to get a fraction of the features offered by the simple, cohesive built-for-education solution offered by BigBlueButton, and laboriously copying Zoom links into Google Classroom (which only wants to promote Google Meet), when Canvas ships with native BigBlueButton integration.

The problem is that you'd have to compete with scum that uses political power/influence and bribes/corruption to sell their software.

Even if your software is better than the competition when it comes to features, the competition can still beat you by selling the school a huge contract and sliding some money under the table of whoever's in charge of evaluating the deal.

This is in fact how a lot of enterprise software is being sold (not just to governments) and how crap software still manages to survive in the face of better alternatives despite being absolutely unusable (because the person who OK's the deal judges it more on the personal benefit he will get from it rather than judging the product on its features and contribution to the business).

Maybe, but just from a product standpoint / features / being competitive, I think it would take a lot to get there anyhow.

I’m quite involved in the Ed tech space and unfortunately it’s an environment where a lot of times it’s more expensive to be poor.

That's true in general as almost all products have a flat cost rather than charging you a percentage of your income.

It's deeper than that. Being poor often means you can't buy in quantity, and most things are cheaper in bulk. If you have to buy one can of soda for example, you're looking at $0.75 USD. If you can afford a little more, you can buy a 12-pack for $3.99 USD.

Or look at buying a home. In Utah the mortgage on a house is typically much lower than the corresponding rent would be, plus you build equity. However if you don't have the down payment or the credit to buy, then you have to rent. Your rent will be say $1,500/mo where as the corresponding mortgage would have been $1,100. It actually costs more for your housing because you are poor.

Whenever I say it's expensive to be poor, that's the kind of stuff I mean. Your options are just far more limited, in a way that makes it difficult to get a good deal.

So not only more expensive proportionally, but more expensive absolutely.

Absolutely, referring to schools in Utah and this is exactly it. The buyer/user/student is penalized for the lack of upfront capital and generally the business model is more aggressive because they don’t have the ability to use capital to escape it.

One of my first jobs was for a k12 district of 4 schools. I was the sole sysadmin for around 1600 users and had to justify any spend to the school board and the PTO, so my decisions were usually based on 1) can I fit this into my very limited time and 2) can I get a grant or significant EDU discount for this.

Usually only commercial stuff targeting EDU (like Microsoft at the time) was what I could get. It's no wonder Google has taken over. Single pane of glass for everything, almost fully automated, much more bulletproof than anything else available. I would have killed for that 15 years ago.

Of course, at that time everything was in 'computer labs' and things werent really that bad since the machines were always available on wired connections. Doing a 1:1 deployment to that many people as a soloist with crappy mid-aughts wifi and windows XP would have been a completely different ballgame.

Why stop at software? This argument could also be applied to all copyrighted or patented objects, which nobody would advocate doing without. Why is software special?

in fact open-hardware and open-ISA are a fact.

> which nobody would advocate doing without

I will advocate right now doing without any copyrighted or patented objects in government if at all practical. Am I anyone?

Three things:

1) If I buy a table, I can, in fact, modify it, resell it, and understand it. I can understand the world around me.

2) If I buy a book, it doesn't come with an EULA which makes me promise my firstborn to a trillion-dollar company. I had patents which expired, and copyrights with fair use provisions. There was a legislative balance.

3) Until a few decades ago, cars and electronics did come with service manuals which, for radios and TVs, contained the full circuit schematic.

The sorts of rights Stallman is talking about are ones which software is new in taking away.

I'd like them back.

While I understand Stallman's appeal to morals, the concerns a school has is preparing students for the future and technical support for administration.

The only software kids really have to understand before leaving school is Windows and Office, because every business uses it.

If you have an issue with a Microsoft product you can get help for it. The same can't be said for open source products.

It's a vicious cycle, though. The kids learn MS Office (and basically no actual computer savvy skills) and then they become manager some day and buy a shit-ton of Office licenses for a business/department that doesn't need any of that.

I've seen these "computer" classes here in the U.S. It's embarrassing stuff like "which menu is the 'copy' command in?". That wont even be true for later versions of Office/Photoshop/Whatever anyway!

Those "computer" classes, like the majority of US classes, target the least capable students. You gotta start them somewhere.

Long ago I was trained with MS Works, a extinct product that I sometimes miss.

> The only software kids really have to understand before leaving school is Windows and Office, because every business uses it.

Absolutely not. They need to understand the fundamentals that allow them to use any software they have to. MSOffice is a microscopic part of the computing kids need to understand this decade.

Lots of short-sighted and defeatist comments about software here, at HN no less. You'd think it was 1995. :D

Newsflash: FLOSS applications are now best of breed, good-enough, or approaching it in every common area. Ubuntu Mate, Firefox, LibreOffice, Postgres, FreeCAD, Python, Audacity, Inkscape, Blender, VLC, Scribus, the list goes on.[1]

All great for students. All used extensively in various industries. All very helpful if you need to learn another package later. We should be learning concepts in grade-schools anyway, not WFW 3.11, right?

Support is available for purchase, as are developers. Think ahead five years, where we could be if a fraction of the torrents of money sent to Bezos, Gates, Brinn, and Page was redirected to these packages instead. FLOSS always gives more options, not fewer.

Android, iOS, and the Web finally broke the Wintel stranglehold, yet most commenters seemingly unaware. Learning MS Office no longer means what it used to either, as it changes every year.

Most regular folks just use Google Docs and don't have a need for 90% of the advanced features anyway. Certainly not students. Kids are very flexible, not rigid geriatrics.

The fact that some niches are not yet served adequately is immaterial. Proprietary options like Zoom work fine on Linux. Kid uses it every day. That some projects are merely Open Source rather than Free Software is irrelevant in the short term as well. Sorry RMS.

The process is a journey, and we don't have to arrive 100% today, or ever for the effort to be worthwhile. Let's get started now. /End of rant :D

[1] https://elearningindustry.com/top-open-source-learning-manag...

- Inkscape compared to Illustrator is weak and extremely unoptimized, and until recently didn't really work on MacOS.

- FreeCAD does everything different than common CAD packages, while Inventor and Solidworks are functionally equivalent.

+ Blender is fantastic, and better than Maya for education IMO as it runs on lower end hardware.

- What percentage of students do you think really need to use Postgres?

Doesn't matter, we're talking about students. Some will use pg directly, most can use a gui via an office suite or browser. Databases are eating the world. ;-)

Especially with older age groups it makes pragmatic sense to try to use the same software as the pupils are likely to encounter in their professional life.

In the majority of cases this means Windows and Office.

Then we end up with more and more schools using M$ because all the businesses use it, and more businesses using M$ because all the kids know it. This is bad for our kids, bad for creating critical thinking employees, bad for pretty much everyone besides Microsoft. If it gets bad enough the government has to step in and strong-arm them like they did with Bell.

I'd argue that anyone in a position to make these types of decisions for their organization has a societal obligation to consider the potential consequences of "just going with the flow" when it comes to contributing to an AWS/Google/Microsoft type monopoly.

Schools are not in a position to change this. They can use whatever they want but then pupils will need to learn things like windows and Office (or Google AWS, Oracle, etc depending on what school we're talking about) when they leave school. So using free software as a matter of principle sounds like a wasted opportunity to teach pupils pragmatic and useful professional skills.

This does not mean that schools cannot also use free software to broaden pupils' horizon, but exclusivity is not a good educational decision, IMHO.

The question is rather why the vast majority of companies use Windows and Office (for example). This is where change has to happen first.

That said, why does 'change has to happen'? Whether software is free software or not is not really an important operational and commercial consideration for a company when it picks software.

He is right and it's the very same reason why open-source and free-software should be used in scientific research.

That's a whole other can of worms, too. How about reproducibility and transparency? How do I know the math is correct when I don't know what MATLAB/whatever is actually doing under the hood?

Exactly!

But, moreover: how can my research be reproducible if someone else can't afford to buy that specific software? Or if the software's version I used is outdated and the updated one does not read the old one's files?

Looking the schools under covid-19 and home-schooling under time and money constrains, this text couldn't be more wrong. Using 100% of open-source tools, no teacher on Earth would be able to do their work.

just don't downvote. Instead come up with an open source alternative for Google suite, supporting their workflows, conference integration, fine tuned for short loop feedback (student/teacher) and deployable by any elementary teacher. And tons of Gigabytes of disk space.

Google Classroom is just a horrible horrible software (ahem SAAS) which is bad at integrating with anything. Plus I have the feeling that any time I'd spend trying to customize it for my students would be wasted because of Google tendency to just depreciate things.

I recenty came back to Moodle after 10 year absence and it is not that bad by comparison. Sure it has lots of warts (and I am sure the underlaying code is a mess) but hey it's just a CRUD.

Worst case scenario I can hack around it.

I will probably get around to getting a program autograder for it.

Colleges could support this by having their programming students actively develop and maintain software to support the education ecosystem. would be great learnings for all

It would be nice...but I just don't see it working in practice.

Zoom was the best-positioned company in the world to handle the influx of remote meetings when the pandemic started, and even they buckled under the strain, at least initially. I can't imagine that Jitsi would be able to handle the load if all schools switched over to it tomorrow, without a couple billion dollars in additional funding.

This note is perhaps conflating hardware with software. It sounds like a reasonable solution to me for each university or school to have some small server hardware running free software that supports their online needs.

That’s a nice idea, but what happens when you have a situation like what happened earlier this year? Every school sent their kids home and they went fully remote. All of those software tools suddenly got a lot more use. If school districts were relying on self hosted solutions, they’d have all had to provision new hardware in a hurry. Hardware they likely don’t have budget for. The reality is that cloud based software makes a lot more sense.

Oh no, please no. The user interface is bad enough for all these parents just trying to get their kids online and doing two things at once on a Chromebook. I cannot imagine the support cost if they were using free software given that's much harder to setup. Also, training is not going to happen. The UI needs to be discoverable.

I spent hours (dialup) downloading what I thought was powerpoint to work on a school project as a kid and it turned out only to be a viewer. Unfortunately buying MS Office wasn’t in the budget either so I was SOL.

Software in school should at least be gratis, which seems to be happening with google docs et all.

I think there is also a mismatch in current software development practices for proprietary SaaS product versus what learning environment need. Modern SaaS companies believe in updating their user experiences early and often i.e. 'continuous delivery vs. big bang' improvements. It's baked into our agile thinking at our core now.

However, in the learning environment, the last thing you want is for the platform to change in small, often subtle ways, that will confuse students and teachers, forcing them to spend time not on the material of the lesson but on the medium of the communications.

This causes significant and unnecessary frustration for all involved.

I’ll ask the same question I’ve asked for 30 years. Maybe someone here has an answer or link.

Is there any peer-reviewed evidence that computers in classrooms lead to better outcomes?

I’ll cede the practical reality of the Covid era.

Had been a solo entrepreneur in edutech sector and I can tell you this may not work. Schools need customisation, support and dont have IT expertise for anything.

In the next century we will achieve a state where everyone writes software of some sort. The best free software is built by people solving a problem for themselves or for something they really understand. Stallman will never build a good ed-tech suite. And today's teachers won't either. But the future teachers, all of whom will know how to build some sort of software, will.

It is inevitable.

Most kids could barely work the programs in my school let alone fix them. This almost sounds like OSS wants to use the schools to create future bug fixers.

Also there isn't a one size fits all criteria (e.g. use the best software, most popular, etc). My views on this are slightly different depending on the situation.

- Situation 1. The class is about teaching some piece of software (e.g. graphic design, 3d, video editing). In that case the class should put an emphasis on the common tools and techniques regardless of what program they use. And contrary to what one would think just teaching more programs does not help. I'm currently in a trade school and we have one software related class and although they are doing the correct thing by teaching us using a variety of programs, the kids still learn by memorizing steps instead of tools because this is how they've always gotten by.

- Situation 2. The software is secondary to the class (e.g. Teams/Zoom right now for virtual classes). In this case the easiest to use and the most appropriate for the job. In this case my school chose Teams and I think it's been a pretty good experience compared to the horror stories I hear about Zoom and custom implementations for exam taking at other schools.

Flawed from the first sentence, this article would have us all insist on free software in a Sith world of absolutes.

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.

Let me ask you: is Stallman talking about schools or businesses?

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?

There's a few but those are quite prominent. Most notably I remember when I took Physics 1 we used some very specific software which name I do not remember but it was proprietary and only on Windows. Other than that almost every class can be done entirely with free software, at least in HS.

> very specific software which name I do not remember but it was proprietary and only on Windows

Because it was the only available software for that specific course or because your teacher told you "this is the software, period"?

Pretty sure this was the only available software, iirc it was some Vernier related thing.

Yeah, buying hardware that has vendor-locks will lock you into that vendor's software.

I think I provided plenty of reasons why a typical school wouldn’t deal with open source. It’s not about something being “mandatory” or not. Schools have budgets and employees just like a company, and they don’t have specialized staff skilled in technology with ample free time to do all the extra configuration and management that most open source software demands.

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.

> 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 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.

Personally, I don’t find the concept of free software to be analogous to free speech. I don’t think they are of the same level of importance, and aren’t even very similar concepts.

Why would anyone pay for software?

In my company we use GSUite and - for those who need offline software - LibreOffice works great!

No. There is almost no free application software that is better than the proprietary equivalent, especially when operated by someone of average tech fluency. The education of our children should not be the proving ground for this effort.

(For systems software of course the Free alternatives are far superior but that’s why nobody has to write essays in their defense).

You're incorrect. BigBlueButton, Jitsi, Moodle and others are just as usable to kids.

It's the teachers that are computer-illiterate and have issues with _everything_ that they haven't been taught how to use.

Computer science in here is basically windblows office training. fucking sad.

Any zealot could make the same argument about the object of his zealotry. “Schools should indoctrinate their students and teach them my way of thinking because it is so great!”

Not everybody gives a shit about free software. Most people—by far—have no practical use for the freedoms it provides.

That is like saying people have no practical use for freedom of speech because they have little or nothing to say.

I recall the first phone I purchase with gps capability required one to pay $10 a month rental on the software required to use the hardware you had purchased.

If you maintained such you would ultimately pay more for the privilege of using really really crummy mapping software than the cost of the entire phone. At the time nobody else was allowed to make mapping software for the phone much less offer it for sale or for free.

Lack of software freedom is leverage you can use to make yourself richer not only at the expense of your customers wallets but at the expense of their maximal enjoyment or even well being.

The various ecosystems that exist now even those full of paid for players is vibrant in part because of the freedom enjoyed by customers and other players. Even Apple for example benefits in part and has benefited from open source software that wouldn't exist without people who valued software freedom.

People don't care about software freedom anymore than they particularly care about EPA regulations but they would care if they couldn't breath.

> Even Apple for example benefits in part and has benefited from open source software that wouldn't exist without people who valued software freedom.

Let’s not get into the free vs open source issue. Apple has benefited from open source, not from free software.

My point is that if free software produces better software, then great—that’s something people care about. But that’s far from clear, and the fact that it’s free won’t make up for it being worse. It’s just irrelevant for almost everyone.

The fact that you believe it doesn't make it so. Maximum profit would be earned from fully locked down environments that have as little freedom as possible so that revenue can be extracted from any possible upside. Example control who is allowed to write software for the platform so that there is only one source of mapping software that can be monetized by the month and by the feature.

The fact that we mostly don't use environments like that is because users and creators value freedom.

The person who wants to write their own closed source mapping software monetized by the month and the feature for 9 dollars a month instead of 10 STILL values software freedom a little.

Most people value software freedom somewhat even if only as what they perceive as the status quo and would get frustrated if that changed.

I think consumers and companies should go their best to shift to them too.

Most of our digital world is built on free code not proprietary crap.

...and open-standards

This assumes we know what schools are for. :(

Would you please elaborate?

I guess that was a bit terse. NPR did a series called 'nice white parents' that went over some of these issues. But, the central question is basically "what is the goal here" . Do kids belong to the state, and the state decides what's best? (and what's involved there) Do kids belong to the parents, and parents decide what's best? What is education? Do we want them job ready? What if these are zero sum games. etc.

I think this assumes we all agree on what schools are for, and that we agree they exist "to teach students to be citizens of a strong, capable, independent, cooperating and free society."

I think many would agree with that purpose at face value, but aren't willing to empower schools to do anything beyond babysitting.

I wish I could give this a lot more than one upvote. Everyone seems to be taking it for granted that it is necessary that the students use some sort of software.

In my opinion it is not the business of schools to teach the use of specific tools, that is what apprenticeships and further education are for.

Schools should teach the fundamentals (what is called in the UK the three Rs, Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic) and extend this with critical reading and analysis, rhetoric, and statistics so that when the students leave school they can do more than read the words in a comic, so that they understand at least basic statistics so that they will not be bamboozled by advertisers and politicians. They should also know something about how and why their home country has the political structures that it has and how their country functions in an international context.

Some schools used to be able to do this for at least some of their students. I know because fifty years ago I attended such schools and yet still had plenty of time to study other subjects, do physical education, and take part in many extra curricular activities.

None of this needed computers although those of us who were interested did learn to program (from 1969 onwards).

The same applies to university studies at undergraduate level. I really can't see that having a laptop and a copy of Microsoft Office would have made studying physics easier for me. I can see that some software might make it seem easier though.

> They are intensely curious to read the source code of the programs that they use every day.

I can't remember ever wanting that.

> Proprietary software rejects their thirst for knowledge: it says, “The knowledge you want is a secret—learning is forbidden!”

I can't ever remember thinking that.

> How do natural-born programmers learn to be good programmers? They need to read and understand real programs that people really use.

Real program != well written program.

This article makes so many statements in the form of "You must do X because of Y otherwise you are immoral" that if any of those would actually be true 99% of programmers today should not be able to exist by his logic.

Anecdotally, I can certainly relate strongly to the quotes you pointed out.

99% people do not want any of these. But it's the 1% who change the world.

> They are intensely curious to read the source code of the programs that they use every day.

It's not quite the same thing, but I remember reading and modifying the source code of Applesoft BASIC games as well as trying to reverse engineer copy protection in the school's computer lab.

The reality though is that open source software's main benefit to schools is the licensing model. Not only does the cost of the software actually being used add up, there are also licenses for the software to manage licenses. On top of that is the effort it takes to manage licenses, which ties into labour costs.

Things have probably changed since I managed a school computer lab a decade back, but I did a test deployment of an all open source solution in an evening of my spare time. It took several months of evenings to build up a similar setup using commercial software. The major difference between the two were the hurdles created by commercial software licensing.

As a software developer who lives from selling software licenses, I don't really like this free and open source movement.

I'm sorry but free software it's just a very big tree that is rooted at 0 dollars. That means that nothing can grow under that tree, no cheap alternatives will be feasible. So free software just makes everything expensive. I have yet to see a casual user crazy about any free application yet.

    > I have yet to see a casual user crazy about any
    > free application yet.

Invite me to dinner if you haven't heard about VIM yet.

casual user heard about vim? no way!

Blender? Now to be fair the Blender software is considered one of the most impressive independent open source projects but people LOVE it.

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