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Comment by MonadIsPronad | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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