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Comment by chrismeller | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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?

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.

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