Great that his institution lets him run servers for his classrooms from “any” place. At my school, first thing: disconnect all your servers except for required lavoratory things. ...
Gotta keep the toilet server up and running...
Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software
51–60 of 233 posts
Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software
#52What's wrong with having to pay for software? Or learning to accept that some software is proprietary? Or even with learning to use the right tool for the job, even if that "right tool" may sometimes come at a cost? Students are required to pay for their education at MIT. Were the costs of this course offset with the costs of the non-free software used in an otherwise "standard course"? People put immense effort into…
I actually think that free software is an excellent choice for a classroom because not only can the students examine how everything works, they can take a copy home with them and modify it.
I wish I had had that opportunity when I studied computer science, because my tools were treated as a sort of "magical black box" with no visibility.
The programs we wrote in class were toy programs, and there was no sort of "reality check" for how our editor or compiler or any other tool was actually written.
Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software
#53What's wrong with having to pay for software? Or learning to accept that some software is proprietary? Or even with learning to use the right tool for the job, even if that "right tool" may sometimes come at a cost? Students are required to pay for their education at MIT. Were the costs of this course offset with the costs of the non-free software used in an otherwise "standard course"? People put immense effort into…
The second of the "four freedoms" of free software is
> The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish.
That is particularly important for students of computer science -- what better way to see how all kinds of software works than by reading and modifying its source code?
I'm surprised if a "standard course" doesn't mostly use free software. Mine certainly did, I remember only a single module where we used a commercial software package (something for hardware simulation). I've never felt that this has limited me in any way. One module had us modifying the Linux kernel.
Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm struggling to understand your reasoning. If the author had said "I only drink fair-trade coffee" would you also object if it happens to be the case that the fair-trade coffee is the cheapest type at his local supermarket?
This isn't an accurate analogy, is it? We're discussing an educational institution with power and authority (MIT), which promotes drinking "free coffee", whilst simultaneously portraying it as somehow morally superior to "coffee one has to pay for" to consume. Growing and selling coffee takes time, labour and effort - yet none of that is being reflected or accounted for when we choose to not pay for the coffee we con…
>whilst simultaneously portraying it as somehow morally superior
Free software is morally superior, see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor.... It provides specific rights to the user so that the user is in control of their computing and not the developers.
> Is this a sustainable approach? Does it promote "choosing the right tool for the job", or does it promote blind idealism ("free is better")?
How to decide what is "blind idealism" and what is "normal idealism"?
Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm struggling to understand your reasoning. If the author had said "I only drink fair-trade coffee" would you also object if it happens to be the case that the fair-trade coffee is the cheapest type at his local supermarket?
This isn't an accurate analogy, is it? We're discussing an educational institution with power and authority (MIT), which promotes drinking "free coffee", whilst simultaneously portraying it as somehow morally superior to "coffee one has to pay for" to consume. Growing and selling coffee takes time, labour and effort - yet none of that is being reflected or accounted for when we choose to not pay for the coffee we con…
You seem to fail to grasp the difference between "free as in beer" (gratis) and "free as in freedom" (libre).
Your coffee-response is all wrong: this is not about "free" coffee, about (not) having to pay for coffee, but about a moral stance on coffee: e.g. demanding the cafetaria only serves Fair Trade coffee, regardless of the price.
This is not about "having to pay for it" at all. The opposite really: running your own jitsi or BigBlueButton is probably more expensive than using the free tier of Teams, Zoom or Hangouts.
I run a large-ish jitsi instance: approx €50/month just for the VPS, my hours probably add another €2000/month to that.
Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software
#56I will probably get downvoted a lot, and this is more or less pertinent to this, so here's a rant: I am quite sick to make software work these days: someone coded something using Python3.6 and numpy1.18.5 then three years pass. Now, it's Python3.8.9 and the software is incompatible with it, so now I have to download Python3.6.5 (not Python 3.6.1) e try to make things work. But then TLS/SSL was discontinued and I'm ge…
> I will probably get downvoted a lot Because this is not relevant with the topic at all?
It's kinda relevant: I imagine sending kids an assignment 3 years old and make them run with current software versions... A lot of them would be disgusted by this back-and-forth installing, tweaking, re-installing, virtual envs, all of that, and will only uses windows let's say, which hides almost everything from the user these days.
I typed "python" on windows the other day and it open the MS-Store, asked me to install Python3.8.3. I said OK. Then: where did it put it? The folder is like a crazy sequence of numbers somewhere in the structure. Is this right? For users, maybe, for developers, a nightmare.
Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm struggling to understand your reasoning. If the author had said "I only drink fair-trade coffee" would you also object if it happens to be the case that the fair-trade coffee is the cheapest type at his local supermarket?
This isn't an accurate analogy, is it? We're discussing an educational institution with power and authority (MIT), which promotes drinking "free coffee", whilst simultaneously portraying it as somehow morally superior to "coffee one has to pay for" to consume. Growing and selling coffee takes time, labour and effort - yet none of that is being reflected or accounted for when we choose to not pay for the coffee we con…
> promotes drinking "free coffee", whilst simultaneously portraying it as somehow morally superior to "coffee one has to pay for" to consume.
The price does not enter into Sussman's argument. Maybe it could, given how students tend to be short on money and abhor paying for expensive textbooks, but it doesn't.
> Growing and selling coffee takes time, labour and effort - yet none of that is being reflected or accounted for when we choose to not pay for the coffee we consume.
In my coffee analogy, the promotion of the fair-trade alternative would be based on the fair-trade mechanism for ensuring the lower levels of the production chain receive a fairer share of the income. Whether or not the author pays less or more at the store is irrelevant to the argument.
> Is this a sustainable approach?
For this class? Almost surely!
For some people (e.g. me)? To a large extent (things aren't black and white). Apart from (the admittedly large chunk of) non-free Javascript run by the websites I visit, and some firmware, my computing world runs entirely on FOSS.
For absolutely everyone in every situation? Surely not. That's OK.
Really, the only point that matters a lot here is the first one.
> Does it promote "choosing the right tool for the job", or does it promote blind idealism ("free is better")?
It seems to me to also promote the fact that FOSS is far more compatible with academic culture and behavior. While indeed you may have to pay publishers for access to articles (luckily a practice that's on decline!), you certainly have complete freedoms to build on the work presented in those articles for your own research!
I'd go so far as to say that no closed tool can ever be "right for the job" in an academic research setting! (Although one sometimes does have to compromise when no adequate alternatives exist, especially when it comes to lab equipment – but in the CS world things are a lot better.)
> And why does a university, which takes exorbitant tuition fees, not prioritize the best software for the course (over the one that's merely free)?
I don't understand what MIT's tuition fees have to do with this.
Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software
#58Obviously he is a great (one of the best?) teachers. Having the lecture use free software only, shows he also cares about ethics at his work. I think that makes him a better teacher. Far too few people in CS care about the ethics side as well.
Yeah right, because MIT is such a cheap school, it totally is required to use free software, because that is going to make a difference. Instead, MIT should make sure that students get their software and materials free of charge, not that the material or software itself is free (just because students on scholarships or alike may not have the money). They should use what is best for the students and not what is best t…
Free software is a matter of freedom, not price. But your comment contradicts itself.
Your posited opposition between "what is best for the students" and "what is best to support some ideology" is without foundation — different ideologies differ precisely in that they make different claims about what is best for people, such as students. Whatever set of claims you endorse about "what is best for the students" constitutes an ideology.
Now, it may be that there is no objectively correct ideology — that, for example, it's just as valid to celebrate the mass human sacrifice of the Khmer Rouge killing fields as an inspiring example of class struggle, as Pol Pot did, as to deplore it as a violation of fundamental human rights. I do not believe this, but some people do.
But you do not seem to be taking such a purely moral-relativist position — instead, you are arguing that MIT "should make sure that students get their software and materials free of charge" and "should use what is best for the students". That is, you are attempting to promote your own ideology about how MIT should teach its classes, arguing that MIT should prefer your ideology to Gerald Jay Sussman's ideology and, implicitly, that MIT's administration should order him to choose different software with which to teach his classes. You are attempting to camouflage your attempted imposition of your own ideology on MIT under a dishonest implicit claim that your own point of view is free of any ideology.
As it happens, MIT does not adhere to your ideology; instead it adheres to an ideology known as "academic freedom", which holds, among other things, that professors and other instructors have fairly wide latitude to choose their manner of teaching, the material they will teach, and the points of view they will express, which easily extends to the choices in question. When the modern ideology of academic freedom was forged in, mostly, the German universities of the 18th and 19th century, it brought them to the frontier of human knowledge and made them the leaders in advancing it; nowadays many of the universities most faithful to this ideology are in the United States, but the principles are the same.
Your call for MIT to abandon its principles and suppress academic freedom, mendaciously cloaked behind a spurious claim of ideological neutrality, is deplorable.
You should not have posted it.
(To preempt some comments, not only do I not teach at MIT or any other university, I've never attended MIT and I didn't even graduate from college; and MIT, roughly speaking, bullied a friend of mine to suicide. This is not about group loyalty.)
Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software
#59What's wrong with having to pay for software? Or learning to accept that some software is proprietary? Or even with learning to use the right tool for the job, even if that "right tool" may sometimes come at a cost? Students are required to pay for their education at MIT. Were the costs of this course offset with the costs of the non-free software used in an otherwise "standard course"? People put immense effort into…
> And in many cases, proprietary/commercial software really does outperform the equivalent FOSS/Libre solution And in most cases, it does not. Why are we teaching people to reach out for the suboptimal tools in these situations?
A large part here is the "sales". Commercial software, almost by definition, has a sales team that ensures their software is bought by universities, companies, governments etc.
Non-commercial software does not have this in that sense. It may have advocates who, out of sheer enthousiasm, bring software into such universities, companies and governments, but hardly ever an actual sales.
And since non-commercial software is largely FLOSS, whereas commercial software if most often proprietary, we see that, simply through sales, the proprietary alternatives are used far more often.
Regardless of any technical merits. Technical superiority hardly "sells" software, sales teams do that. Unfortunately, I might add.
Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I will probably get downvoted a lot Because this is not relevant with the topic at all?
It's kinda relevant: I imagine sending kids an assignment 3 years old and make them run with current software versions... A lot of them would be disgusted by this back-and-forth installing, tweaking, re-installing, virtual envs, all of that, and will only uses windows let's say, which hides almost everything from the user these days. I typed "python" on windows the other day and it open the MS-Store, asked me to inst…
I still don't see the relevance.
How does this relate in any way to "proprietary vs free/libre" software used in classes?