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Comment by davexunit | Hacker News Reader

I was happy to see that my university decided to self-host a Gitlab server for CS students instead of using proprietary options like GitHub or Bitbucket. The students that set up the server learned from the experience, the instructors got around the problems they were having with Bitbucket's account limitations, and the new undergrads have a great platform on which to learn Git.

I would encourage other educational institutions to do the same. Proprietary software like GitHub is anti-educational.

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GitHub is just as anti-educational as proprietary textbooks, proprietary class management software like Blackboard, proprietary hardware like Macs or Dells, and proprietary software like Windows and OSX.

You're welcome to your principles, but they're not always practical.

I think all of that stuff is easily replaceable, in the context of a CS curriculum at the very least, if only other people cared a bit. I took one class that required use of a proprietary circuit modeling program that I ran via Wine, but other than that I did not have to use any proprietary software to complete my CS coursework.

The difficulty with replacing proprietary hardware is that, in some cases, the companies donate it. So you'll have a "dell lab" sponsored by Dell, and it's hard to convince a school to say no to the free equipment and go with another solution

Well, proprietary textbooks about ancient math is kind of silly.

And Blackboard is anti-educational. Have you ever tried to use it?

If it's not anti-educational, it's an affront to education.

Online education is an actually interesting problem space in the world and Blackboard, Desire 2 Learn and some horseshit software from Oracle is like the best stuff out there. It's terrible.

Proprietary software like GitHub is anti-educational.

I have nothing against GitHub, and I use it myself, though I resent its becoming of an official requirement and be-all-end-all holy grail among hipster circles. However, he's right. Proprietary software and education simply do not mix, they're antithetical.

Not to mention GitHub doesn't expose the entire Git functionality (such as options like reflog, the lack of which in client side led to the whole Jenkins gaffe).

What is 'anti-educational' about proprietary software?

At the very least, one can't expect CS students to have an education which is valid for the workforce without any exposure to proprietary software at all.

What is 'anti-educational' about proprietary software?

It doesn't allow users/students to analyse, or learn about, its inner-workings. I don't know how important that is but with git being so easy to deploy, why not use something students can maintain?

Isn't that going a bit overboard in an educational setting, though? Seems to me like it'd be like showing up for a drivers ed class and spending the first semester learning about the history of internal combustion engines.

Sometimes it's best to start with something that transparently "just works", make the students aware of other options like gitlab, and let them explore those if they wish.

Depends on what the end goal of the education system is: to make you a driver/chauffeur or to make you someone who is going to design the car of the future.

How to stage and sequence the exposure to the details is indeed important. I am not advocating exposure to the details right away, but the option has to be available at a reasonable price (be it in money, or in time).

There is also the "teach a person to fish" thing, rather than handing him/her a fish. Although many are in the business of handing out fishes, stale ones too.

That assumes that everyone who was using GitHub for hosting their classwork is engineer capable of hosting their own Git server. What if they are working on frontend HTML/CSS things? or just learning Python? There are lots of valid uses for version control that don't mean you already have the ability to even try to host your own VCS.

No one argues that you need to have people host their own web server to start learning how to write Javascript. In fact, most would argue against hosting your own that early on. It's not beneficial, and more likely to end up tangential annoyances than solving the problems that matter for the person's skill level.

Just because someone teaches you a different part of the stack first doesn't mean they are handing out fish...

Students can maintain a local git repo and just push their results to github. In fact, they must, that's how Git works!

>What is 'anti-educational' about proprietary software?

Proprietary software doesn't give you the freedom to read and modify the source code. The software license forbids learning about it.

>one can't expect CS students to have an education which is valid for the workforce without any exposure to proprietary software at all

There's a lot more to CS than learning to be a code monkey.

>Proprietary software doesn't give you the freedom to read and modify the source code. The software license forbids learning about it.

This is true. However, it is still possible to be taught to code on a Windows machine in Visual Studio, or in Java for Android, etc. Your point of view has merit but it also has a limited context. The tools do matter and some of those tools are closed-source.

>There's a lot more to CS than learning to be a code monkey.

And yet, sooner or later everyone has to eat.

Yes, we know what "proprietary software" means. We're looking for clarification on how using a proprietary tool that allows students to better share source code and collaborate with each other and the society at large counts as "anti-educational".

Conveniently written from your MacBook Pro, right?

Oh, you.

- Sent from my iPad

The difference is students are not forced to use MacBooks when completing coursework.

This begs the question of what you're looking to get out of a git/VCS setup. Unless you're forcing everyone to setup their own Gitlab instance, is your CS department looking to offer a handful of students limited experience with a single task? Or are you looking to use VCS to benefit all of your students during the entirety of their time in your program?

The entire idea behind using VCS in education is to enable better/deeper learning. Github lets students jump right into versioning their work and collaborating with classmates/instructors with minimal fuss and zero overhead. Not to mention that exploring Github can help introduce them to the open source community. Plus, they don't have to deal with IT department BS, worrying about when their old work will be deleted, or the myriad of other factors that can impact how students integrate git into their work.

From a departmental perspective, where time and resources are always stretched it's a no-brainer. Besides, at least Github isn't Blackboard. :shudders:

BitBucket's account limitations? If you sign up with an .edu email address you get unlimited everything for free (including teams). You can even permission repositories with groups from another team account. Overall, I'm pretty impressed with their .edu offering.

Honestly, how is GitHub anti-educational once you get past the fact that several students set up a Gitlab server and learned from it. That's a one time benefit.

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