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Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software

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Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software

#141

Post by chrisseaton »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #125
neilv wrote: post #76

For a professor to use only FLOSS when teaching CS students about software engineering seems entirely appropriate to me, and a good on-principle exercise. Consider the goals of universal accessibility of education, reproducible systems research that can be built upon, allowing students to explore and improve systems, techie obligations to promote privacy and security in information systems, and simply setting an exam…

Sussman is not just "a professor at MIT." He's one of the inventors of Scheme and one of the authors of SICP. And perhaps most apropos for this article, one of the founders of the FSF, along with of course RMS.

> Sussman is not just "a professor at MIT."

You're the only person who said 'just'! You're arguing against something you said.

Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software

#142

Post by neilv »

nanna wrote: post #129

I teach at a world ranking university in the UK which has decided that in order to have a 'standardised student experience' teachers are prohibited from running their own FLOSS setup when there are proprietary contracts in place. Sorry but MS Teams is not designed with teaching in mind. I've been advocating for Big Blue Button and Jitsi but effectively told to shut up. It's infuriating.

If some of the faculty researched the relevance of FLOSS to university missions, and then made a good argument for it, do you think the university would change this IT policy?

Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software

#143

Post by matheusmoreira »

fsckboy wrote: post #91
fsloth wrote: post #79

Don't take this so much as about ideology, than as a mode of pedagogical thought. Free software is decomposable to first principles, and it makes perfect sense to use it in a CS class. If this was some other domain like surgery or structural engineering, using free software would add no value to the process (since the domains are already so deep that the students anyway treat all software as black boxes since their o…

if one were teaching medicine in a third world context, free software would offer many benefits to their clinical practice of medicine.

I'm from a developing country and the quality of commercial EMR systems varies from acceptable to abysmal. They usually have very poor usability and security. I once used a system which backed up the database by making a copy of the MySQL directory on the same machine. This other system would fetch all patient data from web APIs without using HTTPS despite the existence of GDPR-like legislation.

So yeah, there's a lot of room for improvement. Hospitals are unlikely to switch to a new system but new doctors might be open to free software. They need expert support for it though. Encrypted cloud storage services for medical data and images would add a lot of value but I'm not sure if that's legal.

Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software

#144

Post by Nebasuke »

woofie11 wrote: post #98
renewiltord wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is no sheer coincidence that the following three things are simultaneously true: A. MIT is as renowned as it is B. MIT does this C. MIT has people like Gerald Sussman as Professors

... and MIT became famous for work during the AI Lab days. ... MIT is going down the tubes. ... And people like Jerry (correctly) say MIT would never hire someone like them today.

Would you mind giving some context/source for the third remark?

I tried to search for the statement that MIT would not hire someone like Jerry, but I could not find it myself.

Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software

#145

Post by barking »

vertex-four wrote: post #134
barking wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If your ongoing work is not worth anything, why should you be paid extra for work you did in the past? If you write a piece of software that took you a year to write but buyers are only willing to pay $500 for then do (A) live on $500 or (b) try to sell to many buyers including some in the future? You seem to be saying (b) is out of the question but if it is who will write the software these people wish to buy?

You can find multiple buyers before you write the software, you know - you don't have to have just one person paying you. If it's consumer software, things like Kickstarter or Patreon are how this is often done - if it's b2b, this is how a lot of software development is done anyway. Examples of software successfully funded via crowdfunding include Spine, Magit, and Diaspora - although Spine appears to be closed-sourc…

But planning/hoping to sell copies in the future is unethical, is it?

Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software

#146

Post by fsflover »

barking wrote: post #145
vertex-four wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find multiple buyers before you write the software, you know - you don't have to have just one person paying you. If it's consumer software, things like Kickstarter or Patreon are how this is often done - if it's b2b, this is how a lot of software development is done anyway. Examples of software successfully funded via crowdfunding include Spine, Magit, and Diaspora - although Spine appears to be closed-sourc…

But planning/hoping to sell copies in the future is unethical, is it?

Why do you think so? Purism created its products using crowdfunding, i.e. they sold their devices (and free software on them) before anyting was created.

Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software

#147

Post by corty »

ghaff wrote: post #140
httpsterio wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, it's not necessarily feasible to run all the tools one might have at the university and if the only way of doing science is by using expensive apps only available to rich individuals or companies that are well off, well its quite limiting in who can gain an attractive amount of experience working with it. It also sets a baseline for every student and prepares them for a future where science is made to be sh…

Personally I think it's a great practice to default to FOSS, whether community bits or commercially supported for a variety of reasons. However: >if the only way of doing science is by using expensive apps only available to rich individuals or companies that are well off, well its quite limiting in who can gain an attractive amount of experience working with it. The same might be said of all the expensive hardware an…

Machines are naturally scarce, you need resources and labour to build them for each machine. Software is artificially scarce, the reproduction cost for software is almost zero.

So while it is understandable that hardware will be limiting and that cannot really be helped, software should never be a limiting factor in education imho. One can never remove all obstacles, but the easily avoidable ones should be avoided.

Btw., similar arguments apply to books, there is no reason digital versions of books used in education shouldn't be free (as in beer and freedom).

Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software

#148

Post by fsflover »

rimliu wrote: post #132
phkahler wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My approach in all area - work include - is to use FLOSS by default unless I can't for some reason. Usability is one reason, and as a developer it's good to observe the flaws that drive me to commercial software at times. Why would anyone not choose FLOSS by default?

The answer to your question is in your comment. When you consistently have to pick commercial software over floss because of the usability, it makes sense to skip that step and go to the commercial software right away.

The problem with your reasoning is that often free software is better in usability.

Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software

#149

Post by PeterisP »

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #118
Phlogi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the price, it's about the freedom I assume. Having free of charge proprietary software for students is a different approach. I wouldn't call it unethical though.

Why wouldn't you? Using software that restricts your freedom to use, modify, and share in the pursuit of advancing the human understanding of the universe around us seems to be short-sighted. Free Software gives everyone the equal opportunity to leverage the same tools and practices to do research, development, and further our understanding of our world. In most cases, proprietary software does not.

Despite all the advantages of free software, often it is very useful to use a particular proprietary tool and often it is very useful to learn (and thus, teach) how to use a particular proprietary tool, and there's nothing unethical about doing that useful thing instead of refusing to do because it involves proprietary software. Some people would refuse to use proprietary software as a matter of principle, and that's also a valid ethical choice, but it's not the only ethical choice.

Calling an action unethical is a strong accusation. It's very rude to call an action or a person unethical unless the wrongness of that action goes way beyond merely not taking advantage of an opportunity to facilitate some ethical goal, calling it unethical implies some active wrongdoing instead of failing or refusing to take what you consider the most beneficial choice.

Re: Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software

#150

Post by nanna »

vhakulinen wrote: post #133
nanna wrote: post #129

I teach at a world ranking university in the UK which has decided that in order to have a 'standardised student experience' teachers are prohibited from running their own FLOSS setup when there are proprietary contracts in place. Sorry but MS Teams is not designed with teaching in mind. I've been advocating for Big Blue Button and Jitsi but effectively told to shut up. It's infuriating.

You could try to calculate some numbers on savings or "wasted hours because the corporate support is slow and wont fix our problems fast enough" to turn their heads around. Another pointer could be that the students could be involved in running some of the systems. Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot.

The problem is that Microsoft are good at selling a product which just works out of the box and is just about sufficient, even if it's not tailored to your use-case. Plus there's so little transparency as to how much they're charging my university, or how many hours wasted there are, so it's hard to make a price-comparison.

Student participation in some of the projects could work for certain modules, but only as experiments -- again we've been specifically prohibited from spinning up our own solutions.

> Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot.

I agree that ultimately what needs to happen is that those of us who care about FLOSS need to organise and try to chip away at the corporate one-size-fits-all dependency syndrome at the university. The kinds of data ownership debates happening in Germany seem very far off here. The British university is in retreat. [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/10/uk-univers...

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