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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

#211

Post by vertex-four »

barking wrote: post #201
vertex-four wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? If the car contained no software, people would still buy it over alternatives that contain software at various levels for a better driving experience, comfort, and entertainment?

I don't think it's really an option for your average software developer to create a car marque as a way of monetizing their software development.

Becoming employed by a car company that wants to improve the experience of their vehicle is a perfectly reasonable option though. Or writing software for someone else's car - there's more than enough gearheads who'd spend a ridiculous amount of money on custom code for their vehicle if only they were permitted to.

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

#212

Post by ffdixon1 »

gnu wrote: post #193
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.

We're in the process of moving away from an internal build system for the packaging to having the debian package scripts as part of the repo. This work is underway for BigBlueButton 2.3 (the next version) and beyond. Once we get them released, it's going to be a lot easier for others to build and contribute to the packaging.

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

#213

Post by kabes »

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…

Cool. A couple of questions:

1. I can see you offer polls and chat, but those are fairly common. What are the teaching specific stuff you think is most interesting?

2. I had a look at the code. I see you're using Meteor. How is your experience with this (I'm a contributor)?

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

#215

Post by kragen »

rimliu wrote: post #136
Conan_Kudo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow. Please, explain, how writing a book in Libre Office instead of say, Pages, changes some physicists ability to research, development and furthering our understanding of our world. And no, free software does not give anything to everyone . A very small percentage of the world population could make use of the benifits it being open cource, and even smaller ever will.

What's "Pages"?

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

#216

Post by kragen »

PeterisP wrote: post #149
Conan_Kudo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You seem to be committing the same error I called out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475012, although far less egregiously: advocating a form of moral relativism almost everyone would reject, while urging people to take some actions and not others based on normative arguments. If you applied the same reasoning consistently, you would end up saying, "Some people would call an action unethical despite the potential of offending the actor, and although thus speaking out is also a valid ethical choice, it's not the only ethical choice." Unless you're making some kind of fine distinction between classes of undesirable acts that I'm missing?

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

#217

Post by Shared404 »

kick wrote: post #172
nanna wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So long as there isn't a bureaucracy in place to get in the way. That's a limit of Free Software.

That's a limit of bureaucracy, not of free software.

Unfortunately, still an effective limit of FL/OSS software.

Not the software's fault, but still still a limit.

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

#218

Post by Shared404 »

rorykoehler wrote: post #73
marta_morena_24 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's best for students is what's best for society too. That means open standards and open source.

Honestly, imho of course, open standards are even more important than open source. At least with open standards anyone can make their own implementation.

At least until we reach the bloat level of the web.

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

#219

Post by gspr »

bergstromm466 wrote: post #191
gspr wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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_...

The article you point to illustrates that that basic attitude and culture is under threat. I agree. Openness, being able to build on the works of others, and learning "how something ticks on the inside" are still basic to science though.

I, too, wish that what the article illustrates weren't happening, but are you really arguing that you can't take the idea from a published paper, understand it and build your own work on it? The FOSS philosophy is the closest equivalent for code.

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

#220

Post by barking »

vertex-four wrote: post #210
barking wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great software developers deserve to make their fortune too and should be free to do so in a manner that suits both them and their (consenting adult) clients without name-calling from developers with different philosophy/orientation.

Copyright is a legal fiction - it doesn't exist except by force of the state, and there's plenty of evidence that it has a large variety of downsides. I think it's entirely reasonable to argue for alternative methods of providing benefit to society that don't rely on having the state threaten people for you. Or, in other words - the default state of things is that copyright does not exist, not that it does. It's on c…

All software isn't line of business bespoke jobs for mega corp. Family business sometimes need software specific to their vertical market but can't afford to employ someone for a year to do it.
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