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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

#191

Post by bergstromm466 »

gspr wrote: post #135
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It made available licenses for various nonfree programs, but I objected to them on grounds of principle.". Which is to say Sussman could effectively, for the purposes of this course, get _any_ license for free-as-in-beer. So the actual decision would purely be on some other grounds. Since Sussman is a world renowned CS teacher, I choose to believe he made his choice based solely on whether it was most suitable to te…

> (This is not an unreasonable belief: The concept of "Free Software" guarantees that the student is able to take the software apart to see what makes it tick. That is obviously a very valuable property when learning how things work!) And something that resonates very well with the basic attitude and culture of academia/research.

> And something that resonates very well with the basic attitude and culture of academia/research.

I wish! Good joke! (I hope it was?) For those who believe otherwise -> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/27538183_For_Money_...

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

#192

Post by saagarjha »

enjoyyourlife wrote: post #18
noobermin wrote: post #15

It honestly would be great for some competition, FOSS or not in the distance learning department. Blackboard and friends are horrendous, and as we know zoom has myriad problems. For a small group meeting I have each week that is now online, I've started using jitsi too.

Canvas ( https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms ) is open-source

I brought this up once and a couple of university employees were quick to mention that features that actually let them use it at scale cost a bunch of money and there were fairly large support costs even for open source solutions.

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

#193

Post by gnu »

ffdixon1 wrote: post #186

I am the product manager for BigBlueButton. While we implement most of the capabilities you would expect in a web conferencing system, we focus on giving the instructor many ways to engage students for learning. Being open source has enabled many schools around the world to setup and run their own BigBlueButton servers. Thanks to our community, we're localized in over 25 languages, provide a pure HTML5 interface, and…

Thanks so much for giving us BigBlueButton.

Some of the folks in the Debian community have been trying to package it up in Debian and found it a bit challenging that some of the dependencies of BBB work only with specific Ubuntu versions. Would you please help address that and help them move forward with packaging it up and include it in Debian? Thanks again.

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

#194

Post by e12e »

noobermin wrote: post #15

It honestly would be great for some competition, FOSS or not in the distance learning department. Blackboard and friends are horrendous, and as we know zoom has myriad problems. For a small group meeting I have each week that is now online, I've started using jitsi too.

Is there any life left in .lrn?

Based on the ancient aolserver?

https://dotlrn.org/

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

#195

Post by philzook »

"The class used a draft textbook that Chris Hanson and I have written. The book is entitled “Software Design for Flexibility (how to avoid programming yourself into a corner)”; it will be published by MIT Press soon, with a Creative Commons Share Alike license (and all the code in support of the book is under the GNU GPL)."

I'm very excited for this. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-flexibility

For reference, Sussman is an author of Scheme and

- SICP https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...

- Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/structure-and-interpretation-...

- Functional Differential Geometry - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-differential-geome...

All of which are available free online (look for the open access tab)

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

#196

Post by carlmr »

ramshorns wrote: post #178
vikramkr wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some industries where the software is doing something mission critical, it's important to have complete control over the software and even more importantly, you need someone to sue

Is the importance of having complete control over the software an argument against using free software? Surely the best way to have control over it is to be able to read what it does and make it do what you want.

I think the interesting thing here is what I would call the tragedy of overregulation.

Most regulated businesses are big corporations with attached bureaucracies.

When they get a lawsuit because somebody was injured, what will happen is an analysis how this bug could occur.

If it is found that the problem was caused by a library or third party that could get sued, the corporation will sue them and get their money back.

If they find there's no one to sue like with FOSS, they will likely start regulating the use of FOSS.

This has the perverse effect that after a lot of iterations of this cycle the whole toolchain is designed for "sueability" not for quality, performance, or any other worthy goal. Further the toolchain becomes increasingly opaque and proprietary.

Even though the proprietary software has more bugs, and they're harder to find due to their closed source nature, the leaders of Big Corp have covered their asses. The engineers build more workarounds and spend less time improving the quality of Big Corp's code base. The quality of the product suffers. But none of it is the fault of anyone. That's what's important.

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

#197

Post by saagarjha »

vikramkr wrote: post #189
saagarjha wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're really making the argument between writing something yourself versus using an open source solution, instead of picking between an open source and a proprietary solution.

No, I'm comparing R and SAS for example in the above post. Same arguments apply. And again, these arent general to all cases, just a subset of highly regulated/conservative industries

In that case you're just not auditing being able to audit the closed source version, which I see as strictly worse than the situation with open source software which you could audit if you put effort into doing so.

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

#198

Post by bberenberg »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #169
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 bring up a fascinating point. In many large enterprises -- even those that make money in some aspect of computing -- the centralized IT organization controls everything related to computers. I think we would find it odd if, say, the John Deere Corporation was forced by their "Transportation Support" organization to use Honda ATVs for moving people and goods around their factory campus. Or if Yale Law School was n…

I think your examples actually show exactly why IT controls everything, and not people who want to do stuff because they feel like it that day.

John Deere does not make ATVs, they don't make any tier of people moving equipment. The idea that they should use their own is ridiculous. If they didn't enforce the Honda rule, people would be riding around in the front of dozers.

Much in the same way that if Stanford invented new bulbs, they would be used in a lab. With safety standards applied. Why don't you want these newly invented bulbs used all over your building? Well, what happens when they burn your building down? What happens if the people in the lab who invented them decide to make a company selling them, and are busy with that, and now you need to pay your maintenance people to deal with these new bulbs they don't know how to use.

Being slow to change in a larger organization is a feature, not a bug.

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

#199

Post by woofie11 »

systemvoltage wrote: post #174
woofie11 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It was an excellent analogy. Free software is like physical goods with Right to Repair. In the olden days, if you bought a radio, it came with a service manual and a schematic. It's how many people learned EE, and it was a huge loss when that went away. People maintained their own stuff. People tinkered. That's how Sussman learned to EE too. That's an analogy to free software exactly, 100%, and spot-on.

Good points. One major problem is I can make 10,000 copies of the software in a minute. The hardware developer still gets to feed their children with an income.

Turns out I've fed my family just fine working on free software for most of my life (sometimes as a software engineer, but more often as a researcher, entrepreneur, executive, and otherwise). Probably 75% of my jobs.

Even in an extreme hypothetical -- if the government were to mandate that all software be free software -- only a minority of software developers would lose their jobs. Banks still need to manage transactions. Employers still need to manage payroll. Google still needs to serve up ads and search results. And I don't want to host AWS myself. Those organizations will continue to pay to build software.

There's a huge bit of confusion that the word 'free' somehow means you don't get paid. It doesn't. It turns out if the source code pops up on github under a GPL license, most of the time, the world just keeps on ticking.

There are exceptions, of course -- companies like Adobe would likely disappear -- but for 90+% of jobs in software, whether it's free software or proprietary impacts your ability to make money not-at-all.

The most successful organization I helped found was almost exclusively free software. There were hundreds of people using our platform as open source, and zero of them competed with us head-on. The only differences were: (1) our customers trusted us a lot more (if we went away, they wouldn't be SOL) (2) we had a massive amount of engineering work done on someone else's dime.

In more senior roles, or even being more assertive in most junior roles, I could usually release what I was working on as free software by asking. Right now, of the programming work I do, about 90% is free software. The organization I work at is probably 95% proprietary software. The value of keeping me around + good PR + possible contributions + ... is much higher than the value of having exclusive rights to source code that I write.

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

#200

Post by salutis »

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…

At the University of the People [1], we use FLOSS exclusively. Disclaimer: I am a student.

[1]: https://www.uopeople.edu/

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