
Schools Should Exclusively Use Free Software (2014) - crazypython
https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-schools.html
======
December_Stars
Speaking as a student whose school primarily uses Google's suite (classroom,
meet, etc..) but still has a few older solutions, some of which are free
software, I can say that there's a common argument that schools should focus
on pragmatism and working with what they have - the age-old argument that free
software still is not accessible or easy to use. I don't beleive that this is
still an issue.

Out of my current teachers and teachers I've had in the past, almost all of
them were vocal about not liking Classroom or just didn't use it. It is
basically a small layer on top of Google Drive & Meet that does not integrate
anything nearly well enough. Most of my teachers seem to prefer Canvas, a free
software solution to this, because it has more features. My teachers primarily
cited the integrated quiz/test system as its biggest draw when I asked.

Classroom is also is very difficult for less-privileged students to use -
speaking as someone who used to rely on a 4 GB of RAM netbook with a Pentium
and was still using it for part of this quarantine, even with Linux things
really get slow. This could primarily be attributed to relying on a lot of
Google tabs at once (for Drive, forms for quizzes, etc) while Canvas I've
never had to open more than a few maximum. My only other option is to buy a
Chromebook and while my school can afford Chromebooks for every student, many
students are relying on just using what they have.

With that, I don't think that the proprietary software really has all too much
of an advantage in terms of pragmatism (which imo is even more important in
schools). I don't think the usual arguments against adoption of free software
really seem to hold up, though I assume that cost might be an issue that I'm
not aware of seeing my district is rather rich.

I'd love to hear more teachers opinions on this. Hopefully this gave you an
idea of how education tech is from a student user's endpoint.

~~~
haunter
>the age-old argument that free software still is not accessible or easy to
use

Personally I'd say most of the time the problem is the lack of documentation,
help, manuals, guides etc.

I had so many times when I had a problem with a software under Linux and
basically you have to spend hours in Google trying to find that
stackexchange/reddit/askubuntu thread where you might find your answer, or
not.

~~~
mikorym
I think the problem is not the lack of documentation, it is that people don't
know what documentation is.

The iPhone 10 or 11 or wherever we are, does...

...not ship with a manual! Have you ever noticed that? In fact, documentation
is the reason why people struggle with Linux, not the lack thereof. iOS tries
to make things _obvious_. But obvious means obvious for some people and I
assume they maximise for the set of people looking for a smartphone and
perhaps more money than average, with some vague I idea of what kind of UI
"looks current".

In fact, there is a story about a somewhat famous programmer going on
sabbatical with only an installation of one of the BSD variants and from the
documentation was able to make commits to the code... Maybe someone remembers
who it was? It was mentioned on HN comments.

Having said that, yes, it is difficult to read documentation! And that's why
people struggle with Linux, because it is a massive time investment.

~~~
bitwize
Sounds like John Carmack. I seem to recall him doing one of his famous "lock
myself in a hotel room and don't come out until I've hacked something cool"
things, this time with setting up and using an OpenBSD workstation.

And yes, one time I was fooling with NetBSD and went from zero to hello-world
kernel device driver with _just the man pages_. So it's not surprising Carmack
would be able to do the same with OpenBSD.

~~~
mikorym
Right you are! Here is the HN link:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23224584](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23224584)

------
marc3842h
My primary and secondary school used Free Software extensively. They ran
Ubuntu on all school laptops and everyone used LibreOffice. The web browser of
choice was Firefox. The teachers recommended us to use LibreOffice at home too
in order to have full compatibility for our assignments.

I spoke with the IT manager of the school and he's a real fan of open-source.
He gave a talk at a open-source convention about it (in german)[0]. In this
video he talks about how he convinced the local government to budget this, how
it saved cost and much more.

I think this is a great example that this can work and more schools should try
this out. From what I heard, the teachers didn't have too many problems and my
classmats were quick to adopt without many problems. If I'm honest, I
experience more problems with the Microsoft stack in my current school.

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY47YY5BIGc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY47YY5BIGc)

~~~
cpach
Out of curiosity: How did the pupils react to this environment? Where they
annoyed or did they like it?

~~~
murgindrag
I've been in similar environments. Kids are flexible, resilient, and don't
really notice things like this after a very short time. I was in a summer
program in high school where we used Unix, and I think there was a one or two
week curve before it was just in the background. In schools, kids put up with
much more bizarre things. At the end of the day, they just come to understand
that's what the world is.

------
solarman5000
I can't agree more with stallman. It pisses me off to no end that I was forced
to learn autodesk in school, only to graduate and realizing nobody uses it in
the real world. So why did my school pay to teach software nobody uses? Might
as well used FreeCAD to teach the concepts.

I read this article a while ago, and made the decision to ban chromebooks in
my house. I scored a couple cheap laptops, threw Ubuntu MATE on them, and told
my kids to have fun, break it, fix it, do anything they want. I'm gonna raise
admins, while the school raises ignorant complacent users

~~~
exotree
Autodesk is most certainly used by a huge variety of businesses for a
multitude of purposes. Is it the only solution? No. But the school also likely
got the software at a steep discount or free, exposing you, as a student, to
CAD software in general. What tools you use following that are up to you, but
the school did its job in teaching you a general skill that can be applied in
a variety of other programs at will.

~~~
sterkekoffie
>What tools you use following that are up to you

For most, they're up to your employer. If everyone I interview knows AutoCAD
because they all learned AutoCAD in college, I'm probably going to purchase
AutoCAD. Companies provide those steep discounts to students because they want
to condition you, not because it's good PR. And it's such an effective
strategy that you never even have to consider that other programs exist, let
alone that they could be worth your time.

~~~
pnutjam
Last time I worked with CAD people, solidworks was making inroads on autoCAD.
It's a slow change industry.

------
wedowhatwedo
At my university, we are heavily dependent upon Microsoft. The reasoning is
that it has more features than the open source equivalents. It was pointed out
that the over $1 million a year given to Microsoft could be used to implement
those features in the open source tools and it wouldn't take long to get
there. That was in the 1990's. We now give Microsoft many more millions a year
and have ever since.

~~~
thebean11
> It was pointed out that the over $1 million a year given to Microsoft could
> be used to implement those features in the open source tools and it wouldn't
> take long to get there.

$1 million to implement the features sure, but what about actually hosting and
administering the open source software? On call engineers aren't cheap and
it's going to break on finals week.

~~~
justinmeiners
Don't most universities host their own software?

~~~
smt88
A few years ago they did, but Google, Microsoft, and some of the cloud LMS
companies have started to shift them onto the cloud.

As someone who had a university IT dept as a client, it's honestly much better
for the school. University IT is almost universally a disaster and bottleneck.

------
romantomjak
To play the devil’s advocate - I reckon it’s all to do with support. If
something breaks they can just pick up the phone and tell them to sort it out.
What will they do when a random open source program breaks? Open a github
issue?

I’m also sure deals like that come with other goodies, for example, my
university offered free, licensed windows, office & visual studio
installations.

Also, electronics course had windows-only software that we all had to use.

I’m sure it’s not that easy to switch. There must be deals on deals upon deals
depending on where the school budget comes from and who approves it and so on.

~~~
michaelt
_> I reckon it’s all to do with support. If something breaks they can just
pick up the phone and tell them to sort it out._

You must have a very different experience with getting support for proprietary
software than I do.

You can spend four- and five-figures per seat per year on CAD software, and
still only get canned responses suggesting you uninstall and reinstall. You
can license Google Docs for 2000 employees, doesn't mean you can get a single
easily reproducible bug fixed.

~~~
dfxm12
If you don't buy support for software, _you 're_ the support team.

Maybe that's something a savvy teacher is willing to take on for a small,
advanced class where the students largely know what they're doing, or at least
have a reasonable baseline of prior education.

It certainly doesn't scale when we're talking school wide software, tiny IT
teams and dozens of thousands of students & and hundreds of faculty of varying
levels of computer literacy all bringing their own devices.

I guess it depends on if you have a strong enough IT team to provide that
support or not. I doubt many schools, or even large corporations do.

~~~
murgindrag
The #1 platform in schools is Google.

Google doesn't provide support either.

Or to be specific, there is a support email with obnoxious, egoistic minimum
wage drones who make Comcast look great. There are all sorts of broken self-
serve automated systems too. Empowered employees capable of understanding what
they're talking about? They do their best to shield them from customers.

Google stuff mostly works. When it doesn't, you're mostly SOL. It's like that
even if you pay for the fancy enterprise stuff.

Microsoft has support. They're also nowhere close to being the #1 platform in
schools. Apple has support. Ditto.

------
vxNsr
Free software isn’t really free, it requires a team of software developers to
maintain the self hosted servers that it’s running on. School budgets are
pretty stretched, if they can get away with free OneDrive or gDrive, and the
associated cloud suite of software, that doesn’t mean they can drop in libre-
office and whatever cloud software is free.

~~~
TallGuyShort
>> Free software isn’t really free, it requires a team of software developers
to maintain the self hosted servers that it’s running on

Free (libre) software isn't necessarily free (gratis) either. Stallman isn't
against people being compensated for providing a service, he's against
licenses and business models that restrict what you're allowed to do with
stuff, especially after you've paid for it. And paid software doesn't really
eliminate the need for trained (non-gratis) administration personnel and
additional management infrastructure either.

As usual I think the absolute of what Stallman's saying here isn't very
pragmatic, but the way many schools depend entirely on massive Microsoft
contracts isn't really pragmatic either. My school paid a _huge_ amount of
money for these huge accounts with Microsoft. And I saw a lot of students
leave school with a heavy dependence on Microsoft. I on the other hand, also
completed virtually all of my assignments on a tiny Linux netbook using
OpenOffice / LibreOffice that cost me a fraction of what everyone else was
using. And even as someone who loves the idea of running `git clone` for
software I use to make little tweaks? I never once in 4 years found a reason
to do that for OpenOffice or LibreOffice.

Are those Microsoft contracts really worth it for places that have limited
funding and a charter to provide education for the broadest good? I'd
absolutely agree there's cases where it's better for the school to simply
purchase something quick that solves their problem. I wouldn't have a problem
with that. But most of the arguments I hear against even considering the
alternatives just sound like resistance to change for the sake of it.

~~~
rimliu
There is another point hidden there. You can use free software in schools just
fine. What happens when kids leave the schools? They will face MS Office or
Google Docs. Maybe the idea there is that those kids then push to replace
those with Libre Office, but that's a pipe dream. So they will have to learn
those non-free products. And given that only minority learn the concepts not
what exactly which button to push, there will be a lot of unhappy people in
the offices.

~~~
TallGuyShort
>> So they will have to learn those non-free products. And given that only
minority learn the concepts not what exactly which button to push, there will
be a lot of unhappy people in the offices.

If your standard for educational institutions is to learn how to push specific
buttons and be unable to learn new software, then they will be failing
miserably. And not just because, as you point out in your comment, not every
company uses the same office suite. By your standard, using MS Office is
already a pragmatic failure for students who go somewhere where they use
Google Docs.

~~~
rimliu
No, it is not my standart for education institutions. And (I hope) it is not a
standard to teach. Alas, it is standard thing for people to learn. And, sadly
enough, thi applies in all the areas. Concepts are hard, let's go shopping. I
see it all the time in somewhat techincal hobbies: not many care about what's
happening at the concept level, they just want a button to push and get the
result. If that button is moved, there is a trouble.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Your arguments apply to all office suites. Not free ones. I'm not sure what
you're trying to suggest schools should do here.

------
EricE
I know this is hard for some to grasp - but not everyone wants to learn how to
code! I have no problem advocating that when teaching about computers open
source software makes sense.

However, blanket advocation that there is zero value in proprietary software
is just plain nuts and bordering on religious zealotry. Life is about balance;
extremes are rarely useful - especially long term.

~~~
ryukafalz
Free software has value far beyond just computing education. Whether you want
to learn to code or not, there’s a distinctly asymmetric power relationship
that you inevitably end up in if you use proprietary software.

Think about the pervasive data collection you see in many mainstream
applications and devices now: smart TVs perform content recognition to try and
figure out what you’re watching, VR headsets track much of what you do in VR
and report back to the manufacturer, mobile apps look for information that can
be used to identify users across apps to aggregate data about their users. Do
you think these kinds of things would be so widespread if we were all using
free software?

Sure, not everyone is a programmer, but those of us who are could inspect the
software and patch out all the tracking code. Even without that, though, I
think the additional transparency would make companies less likely to do
things like this.

~~~
EricE
"there’s a distinctly asymmetric power relationship that you inevitably end up
in if you use proprietary software."

Yes, all proprietary software vendors are stereotypical mustache twirling
villains.

This is the kind of overheated rhetoric that causes people to tune out open
source advocates.

Also I don't need open source software to see that vendors have tracking code.
I also don't have to use their software. I have yet to hook a smart TV up to
the internet and have zero intention of ever doing so. A lot of people hook up
smart TVs to the Internet because it's the easiest path to get to the Netflix
app. You think they are going to swap out the code on their TV even if it was
a choice? That's delusional. It would be far easier for them to just plug in
an Apple TV if privacy is a top concern - but sadly for most people privacy
isn't a concern.

As for VR headsets they are such a niche case, other than us nerds it's not
even on the mainstream radar. And once it gets to a point where it is more
mainstream there will no doubt be companies like Apple making a big deal about
Privacy being a key differentiator for them. So yeah, you might have a quicker
path if everything was open source and you had the capability to do it
yourself, but open source is hardly the ONLY path to get these results.

~~~
ryukafalz
>Yes, all proprietary software vendors are stereotypical mustache twirling
villains.

I didn't say they were all evil or malicious. I said there is an asymmetric
power relationship. This is true whether or not you trust the vendor. You
might! But it's good to be aware of it nonetheless, and to think about:

\- How much do you trust them?

\- Are they incentivized to keep your data safe and private?

\- Do you think you'll still be able to trust them 5 years from now?

To varying degrees, the platform owner has a significant say over your use of
the platform. It's more pronounced the more locked-down the platform is, but
for example: if Apple doesn't want you to run some software on iOS, it's going
to be very difficult for you to run that software. If Microsoft decides to
push an update to Windows that adds more intrusive telemetry, you have little
choice; Windows is going to force an update and you're going to get that
telemetry whether you like it or not.

>Also I don't need open source software to see that vendors have tracking
code.

You don't necessarily, but it's a hell of a lot easier to tell if you can see
the source code.

>You think they are going to swap out the code on their TV even if it was a
choice? That's delusional. It would be far easier for them to just plug in an
Apple TV if privacy is a top concern - but sadly for most people privacy isn't
a concern.

Just looked up the current top-selling TVs on Amazon, this one[0] is currently
#1, selling for $130. Adding an Apple TV to the mix ($150 for the base model)
would more than double that cost. You, me, and probably most people on this
site can easily afford that - but for a lot of people that's a more difficult
choice.

Yes, I absolutely believe that some people would replace applications on their
TVs with alternatives with less surveillance - possibly many people, if the
process were easy.

[0]
[https://www.amazon.com/TCL-32S325-Inch-720p-Smart/dp/B07G9XZ...](https://www.amazon.com/TCL-32S325-Inch-720p-Smart/dp/B07G9XZ83W)

------
MonadIsPronad
Schools seem so fundamental to creating the fabric of society, to me. To have
a school system under the contractual obligations of a company, whos common
primary incentive is wholly financial, seems like a good way to weaken the
mechanisms that produce a good, happy society.

Free software does indeed seem like a good thing to require in our society-
cornerstone systems: schools, hospitals, government systems etc.

~~~
clarkmoody
So we've had nationwide government schooling in the United States for a bit
over a hundred years at this point. Would you say that those schools have
created a "good, happy" fabric of society?

~~~
pessimizer
As compared to the time before free public education? As a black person I'll
say that it's not great now, but definitely better than the 1920s for anyone
in my family. As southern sharecroppers, we were pretty much serfs.

------
mcv
With pain in my heart I just installed MS Office on my son's laptop because he
needs it for school (free on a license from school fortunately). I thought it
was stupid because LibreOffice. He thought it was stupid because Google Docs,
which his primary school used.

I particularly find it stupid because Open Document Format is what students
should be using, not some proprietary format.

Thing is, schools want to teach, not maintain software. And many companies
offer attractive ways for schools to provide their students with the software
they need. Someone should do the same with Free Software, make sure it works
perfectly, and then call every single school to convince them to use this
instead of Microsoft or Google. And then schools will still prefer the system
that everybody else is using and has proven itself.

~~~
MH15
Next time you can always have your son install it on his laptop, maybe he'll
start exploring other options.

------
woeirua
This is hopelessly idealistic. It might make sense for some particular general
purpose applications, e.g. Office -> LibreOffice, but at the college level
there are simply not suitable free alternatives for many proprietary software
packages. Additionally, many potential employers specifically want graduates
with experience with those proprietary packages, so not providing them with
that experience handicaps them relative to graduates from other schools that
do provide that experience.

~~~
michaelmrose
Public Education is where you learn stuff like science, math, writing,
literature. It is not where you learn how to use the current version of
Microsoft office that will be obsolete in 5 years.

Anyone who is computer literate can likely be trained to use a particular
software package by their employer. This is especially true when their
particular company is liable to use a fair bit of very specific
applications/web applications to manage the company's particular business.

It is impossible and pointless to worry about whether high school graduates
know particular software packages when there are many and varied different
choices for any industry and so many industries to pick from.

Higher ed should still be about the subject matter not once again particular
soon to be obsolete versions of whatever software is common in their industry.

When you spend 4-10 years learning a topic being 6 hours behind another
applicant doesn't seem much like a handicap.

------
boogies
The FSF recently created a petition to promote free software in schools:
[https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/sign-this-petition-
for-f...](https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/sign-this-petition-for-freedom-
in-the-classroom)

~~~
cbm-vic-20
"We'll get in touch with their administration on your behalf, and let them
know that a global community of activists and everyday people alike have
signed a statement in support of free software in education."

Sure, but how does this solve the problems that schools have? The problems
that are currently being solved well enough now by the likes of Google and
Microsoft? If the FSF wants this to succeed, they need to demonstrate and
convince school districts that Free Software can meet their needs with costs
they can afford. It would help their position if they could show a school
district that has successfully gone in this direction.

~~~
boogies
They do something somewhat along those lines
[https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-
cases.html#content](https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-cases.html#content)
[https://www.gnu.org/education/successful-resistance-
against-...](https://www.gnu.org/education/successful-resistance-against-
nonfree-software.html#content).

But I think the FSF would rather focus on ideals, absolute purity, and
technical stuff like LibreJS tagging than do marketing for the impure populist
Ubuntus of the education world (like Canvas) that already have corporations to
do that (like Instructure, kind of like Canvas’ Canonical).

------
bradly
The day before our kinder's and second grader's school started we got a
message from the teacher that they were changing the software to be used for
remote teaching at the last moment. This sounded very strange so we googled
the company name, Acellus. It turns out the curriculum is filled with racist
and sexist content. I do not believe this would have happened if using FOSS.

[https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/08/hawaii-schools-dump-
distan...](https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/08/hawaii-schools-dump-distance-
learning-program-over-racist-content/)

~~~
EricE
lol - just look at the code of conduct fiasco with Linux over the last year or
so. If you think FOSS is immune from ideological injection your deluding
yourself.

~~~
bradly
I do not believe FOSS elementary curriculum would have racist and sexist
content.

~~~
EricE
That's a nice belief, but there is nothing special with FOSS that would
prevent it. Majority rules when there is no hierarchical structure - for
example the amount of politically motivated editorializing in Wikipedia makes
whole swaths of it highly questionable - article content is driven by the
largest tribe, not facts.

~~~
bradly
It's not about majority rules–it is about openness. I'm not concerned if a
single person controls the content or a large community ruled by the majority.
What matters to me is that the content is publicly available for all to see
and review.

With open curriculum parents can look at what is being taught and make a
decision based on the content. In a closed system this is not possible. The
only reason Acellus became an issue this year was because someone on twitter
took a picture of their child's lesson and luckily the media picked up on it.

------
RRWagner
>> Proprietary software rejects their thirst for knowledge: it says, “The
knowledge you want is a secret—learning is forbidden!” Proprietary software is
the enemy of the spirit of education, so it should not be tolerated in a
school, except as an object for reverse engineering.

Myself, as the creator of the most widely-used K-12+ software of the 90s and
early 2000s, HyperStudio, can say that nothing in that statement is true about
the software that I created then, before, nor afterwards.

~~~
Hackbraten
Good point, and I appreciate your outstanding work and respect the fact that
developers have to eat, too.

One could still make a point over whether learning how your product works
internally is kind of a secret when the child can’t look at the source code,
can’t tinker with it to add features and can’t share that knowledge with
others.

------
TrackerFF
I'm happy to see that Academia has embraced Python the past years. When I went
to college, almost every science class which required coding / scripting used
MATLAB. Luckily stats classes either used R or Octave, but MATLAB was
generally heads above anything else, in terms of usage.

I have observed that some businesses and groups, that sprung out of Academia,
still heavily use MATLAB. I guess that's logical - as their users come from
MATLAB-heavy environments.

But still, it kinda sucks because:

\- MATLAB is still proprietary, and costs money

\- The larger the codebase becomes, the more incentive there is to stick with
MATLAB

\- You somewhat limit yourself on potential candidates that can (or WANT) to
work with MATLAB.

The only true benefits I see from using proprietary languages like MATLAB,
would be very specific and optimized packages / libraries, along with good
support...but then again, being dependent on vendors for updates is rarely a
comfortable experience.

~~~
abdullahkhalids
I have used MATLAB extensively. I exclusively use python these days. I would
say in terms of quality MATLAB is 8.5/10 and python is like a 6.5.

I am always searching google to fix something not working on python. In
matlab, just refer to the docs.

~~~
bitdivision
I would say the exact opposite. I found MATLAB painful to work with at
university. Using python for everything after that has been a breath of fresh
air.

------
jakuboboza
Well schools should do both and learn skills that are easily transferable.
Show options, but not deny any out right option.

That is the theory. Often program for pupils is written by some dude in
capital who gets a slice of the pie. Or is not competent enough to know that
there is free software.

It is a vicious circle if you have super good education system your country
grows if not you go to shits.

I'm not an expert but I think that the better education system is the better
prospects for future in any given country is.

When I was in primary school all we learned was MS-DOS + Norton Commander :D
In high school we had some of the Windows 95 stuff, Word and ofc all the way
since later primary to end of highschool Turbo Pascal.

------
nelaboras
This is the wrong perspective. The perspective should be on governments taking
that role and use educational funds to generate commons. There are several
issues around making all this work, but the key issue is scale: an individual
school has no capacity to decide or handle that, they can only choose what
works. It's at regional or national level that there's sufficient scale.

At the same time can an education system set up software etc that rivals the
effectiveness of professional and smooth software? Sometimes easier than
contract than to try and create/adapt aomehtknf yourself

~~~
StillBored
I came here to say much the same about textbooks.

In the case of textbooks not much has changed with middle school algebra in
the past 100+ years, but we are still paying >$100 a textbook (these days
ebooks!) for books which can be found with a google search. In many cases
because the free books are missing some fine tuning an individual state wants
to make.

In the us we have "common core" in a lot of states, and if there is a problem
with a free e-book, they should have hired someone to fix it rather than
paying the big publishing books orders of magnitude more money for book
rentals.

Similarly with software, maybe the commercial offerings are better this year,
but we should be _investing_ in open solutions rather than paying rent to
large corporations only interested in profiteering in the education sector.

But those companies, and the lack of widespread political will makes it
generally infeasable for any single school district to create a "google
classroom" (or whatever). A few states getting together and putting wording in
the procurement process that say that commercial offerings which are based on
free software are preferred, and where solutions fall short, a small fraction
of the payment to the commercial offering needs to be redirected as investment
in open software.

The goal is to create Redhat type organizations that improve and support free
software offerings, rather than proprietary solutions which cannot be afforded
by the smaller or economically disadvantaged districts.

------
duxup
Would it be viable to start with 100% free software and build a business that
sells it as a service to schools?

That way training and etc would be available and etc?

When I think of it that way and my son's elementary school the sheer volume of
changes and additions and ... I duno that seems like a HUGE lift to get them
anywhere near where they are now in terms of features, ease of use,
administration, etc.

I like the philosophy here, I just don't know if it is possible to get
anywhere near the same level of features and etc.

~~~
Nextgrid
The problem is that you'd have to compete with scum that uses political
power/influence and bribes/corruption to sell their software.

Even if your software is better than the competition when it comes to
features, the competition can still beat you by selling the school a huge
contract and sliding some money under the table of whoever's in charge of
evaluating the deal.

This is in fact how a lot of enterprise software is being sold (not just to
governments) and how crap software still manages to survive in the face of
better alternatives despite being absolutely unusable (because the person who
OK's the deal judges it more on the personal benefit he will get from it
rather than judging the product on its features and contribution to the
business).

~~~
duxup
Maybe, but just from a product standpoint / features / being competitive, I
think it would take a lot to get there anyhow.

------
dathanb82
This argument seems to rely heavily on the idea that non-free software is
unethical. If you’re already bought into that idea, then clearly schools ought
to only use free software. If you’ve not bought into it already, there’s
nothing here that’s likely to change your mind.

~~~
fsflover
It's not just ethically wrong. There are also practical implications:
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-
impor...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-
important.html)

~~~
dathanb82
Maybe so. I disagree with much of Stallman’s platform. But regardless of that,
I was just observing that the arguments offered in the article in addition to
the rest of the dialogue about free vs proprietary software are mostly based
on the idea of a moral or ethical imperative behind free software, and relies
on an existing body of work to make arguments about _why_ that imperative
might exist. Since the article doesn’t attempt to justify the existence of
that imperative, it mostly serves as a statement of position, rather than an
argument that’s likely to win anybody over who isn’t already on board with the
idea.

------
awat
I’m quite involved in the Ed tech space and unfortunately it’s an environment
where a lot of times it’s more expensive to be poor.

~~~
judge2020
That's true in general as almost all products have a flat cost rather than
charging you a percentage of your income.

~~~
freedomben
It's deeper than that. Being poor often means you can't buy in quantity, and
most things are cheaper in bulk. If you have to buy one can of soda for
example, you're looking at $0.75 USD. If you can afford a little more, you can
buy a 12-pack for $3.99 USD.

Or look at buying a home. In Utah the mortgage on a house is typically much
lower than the corresponding rent would be, plus you build equity. However if
you don't have the down payment or the credit to buy, then you have to rent.
Your rent will be say $1,500/mo where as the corresponding mortgage would have
been $1,100. It actually costs more for your housing because you are poor.

Whenever I say it's expensive to be poor, that's the kind of stuff I mean.
Your options are just far more limited, in a way that makes it difficult to
get a good deal.

~~~
awat
Absolutely, referring to schools in Utah and this is exactly it. The
buyer/user/student is penalized for the lack of upfront capital and generally
the business model is more aggressive because they don’t have the ability to
use capital to escape it.

------
HPsquared
Why stop at software? This argument could also be applied to all copyrighted
or patented objects, which nobody would advocate doing without. Why is
software special?

~~~
murgindrag
Three things:

1) If I buy a table, I can, in fact, modify it, resell it, and understand it.
I can understand the world around me.

2) If I buy a book, it doesn't come with an EULA which makes me promise my
firstborn to a trillion-dollar company. I had patents which expired, and
copyrights with fair use provisions. There was a legislative balance.

3) Until a few decades ago, cars and electronics did come with service manuals
which, for radios and TVs, contained the full circuit schematic.

The sorts of rights Stallman is talking about are ones which software is new
in taking away.

I'd like them back.

------
mixmastamyk
Lots of short-sighted and defeatist comments about software here, at HN no
less. You'd think it was 1995. :D

Newsflash: FLOSS applications are now best of breed, good-enough, or
approaching it in every common area. Ubuntu Mate, Firefox, LibreOffice,
Postgres, FreeCAD, Python, Audacity, Inkscape, Blender, VLC, Scribus, the list
goes on.[1]

All great for students. All used extensively in various industries. All very
helpful if you need to learn another package later. We should be learning
concepts in grade-schools anyway, not WFW 3.11, right?

Support is available for purchase, as are developers. Think ahead five years,
where we could be if a fraction of the torrents of money sent to Bezos, Gates,
Brinn, and Page was redirected to these packages instead. FLOSS always gives
more options, not fewer.

Android, iOS, and the Web finally broke the Wintel stranglehold, yet most
commenters seemingly unaware. Learning MS Office no longer means what it used
to either, as it changes every year.

Most regular folks just use Google Docs and don't have a need for 90% of the
advanced features anyway. Certainly not students. Kids are _very_ flexible,
not rigid geriatrics.

The fact that some niches are not yet served adequately is immaterial.
Proprietary options like Zoom work fine on Linux. Kid uses it every day. That
some projects are merely Open Source rather than Free Software is irrelevant
in the short term as well. Sorry RMS.

The process is a journey, and we don't have to arrive 100% today, or ever for
the effort to be worthwhile. Let's get started now. /End of rant :D

[1] [https://elearningindustry.com/top-open-source-learning-
manag...](https://elearningindustry.com/top-open-source-learning-management-
systems)

~~~
MH15
\- Inkscape compared to Illustrator is weak and extremely unoptimized, and
until recently didn't really work on MacOS.

\- FreeCAD does everything different than common CAD packages, while Inventor
and Solidworks are functionally equivalent.

\+ Blender is fantastic, and better than Maya for education IMO as it runs on
lower end hardware.

\- What percentage of students do you think really need to use Postgres?

~~~
mixmastamyk
Doesn't matter, we're talking about students. Some will use pg directly, most
can use a gui via an office suite or browser. Databases are eating the world.
;-)

------
asciimov
While I understand Stallman's appeal to morals, the concerns a school has is
preparing students for the future and technical support for administration.

The only software kids really have to understand before leaving school is
Windows and Office, because every business uses it.

If you have an issue with a Microsoft product you can get help for it. The
same can't be said for open source products.

~~~
ragnese
It's a vicious cycle, though. The kids learn MS Office (and basically no
actual computer savvy skills) and then they become manager some day and buy a
shit-ton of Office licenses for a business/department that doesn't need any of
that.

I've seen these "computer" classes here in the U.S. It's embarrassing stuff
like "which menu is the 'copy' command in?". That wont even be true for later
versions of Office/Photoshop/Whatever anyway!

~~~
asciimov
Those "computer" classes, like the majority of US classes, target the least
capable students. You gotta start them somewhere.

Long ago I was trained with MS Works, a extinct product that I sometimes miss.

------
mytailorisrich
Especially with older age groups it makes pragmatic sense to try to use the
same software as the pupils are likely to encounter in their professional
life.

In the majority of cases this means Windows and Office.

~~~
Liquix
Then we end up with more and more schools using M$ because all the businesses
use it, and more businesses using M$ because all the kids know it. This is bad
for our kids, bad for creating critical thinking employees, bad for pretty
much everyone besides Microsoft. If it gets bad enough the government has to
step in and strong-arm them like they did with Bell.

I'd argue that anyone in a position to make these types of decisions for their
organization has a societal obligation to consider the potential consequences
of "just going with the flow" when it comes to contributing to an
AWS/Google/Microsoft type monopoly.

~~~
mytailorisrich
Schools are not in a position to change this. They can use whatever they want
but then pupils will need to learn things like windows and Office (or Google
AWS, Oracle, etc depending on what school we're talking about) when they leave
school. So using free software as a matter of principle sounds like a wasted
opportunity to teach pupils pragmatic and useful professional skills.

This does not mean that schools cannot _also_ use free software to broaden
pupils' horizon, but exclusivity is not a good educational decision, IMHO.

The question is rather why the vast majority of companies use Windows and
Office (for example). This is where change has to happen first.

That said, why does 'change has to happen'? Whether software is free software
or not is not really an important operational and commercial consideration for
a company when it picks software.

------
gr2zr4
He is right and it's the very same reason why open-source and free-software
should be used in scientific research.

~~~
ragnese
That's a whole other can of worms, too. How about reproducibility and
transparency? How do I know the math is correct when I don't know what
MATLAB/whatever is actually doing under the hood?

~~~
gr2zr4
Exactly!

But, moreover: how can my research be reproducible if someone else can't
afford to buy that specific software? Or if the software's version I used is
outdated and the updated one does not read the old one's files?

------
beervirus
Any zealot could make the same argument about the object of his zealotry.
“Schools should indoctrinate their students and teach them my way of thinking
because it is so great!”

Not everybody gives a shit about free software. Most people—by far—have no
practical use for the freedoms it provides.

~~~
michaelmrose
That is like saying people have no practical use for freedom of speech because
they have little or nothing to say.

I recall the first phone I purchase with gps capability required one to pay
$10 a month rental on the software required to use the hardware you had
purchased.

If you maintained such you would ultimately pay more for the privilege of
using really really crummy mapping software than the cost of the entire phone.
At the time nobody else was allowed to make mapping software for the phone
much less offer it for sale or for free.

Lack of software freedom is leverage you can use to make yourself richer not
only at the expense of your customers wallets but at the expense of their
maximal enjoyment or even well being.

The various ecosystems that exist now even those full of paid for players is
vibrant in part because of the freedom enjoyed by customers and other players.
Even Apple for example benefits in part and has benefited from open source
software that wouldn't exist without people who valued software freedom.

People don't care about software freedom anymore than they particularly care
about EPA regulations but they would care if they couldn't breath.

~~~
beervirus
> Even Apple for example benefits in part and has benefited from open source
> software that wouldn't exist without people who valued software freedom.

Let’s not get into the free vs open source issue. Apple has benefited from
open source, not from free software.

My point is that if free software produces better software, then great—that’s
something people care about. But that’s far from clear, and the fact that it’s
free won’t make up for it being worse. It’s just irrelevant for _almost
everyone._

~~~
michaelmrose
The fact that you believe it doesn't make it so. Maximum profit would be
earned from fully locked down environments that have as little freedom as
possible so that revenue can be extracted from any possible upside. Example
control who is allowed to write software for the platform so that there is
only one source of mapping software that can be monetized by the month and by
the feature.

The fact that we mostly don't use environments like that is because users and
creators value freedom.

The person who wants to write their own closed source mapping software
monetized by the month and the feature for 9 dollars a month instead of 10
STILL values software freedom a little.

Most people value software freedom somewhat even if only as what they perceive
as the status quo and would get frustrated if that changed.

------
pelasaco
Looking the schools under covid-19 and home-schooling under time and money
constrains, this text couldn't be more wrong. Using 100% of open-source tools,
no teacher on Earth would be able to do their work.

~~~
pelasaco
just don't downvote. Instead come up with an open source alternative for
Google suite, supporting their workflows, conference integration, fine tuned
for short loop feedback (student/teacher) and deployable by any elementary
teacher. And tons of Gigabytes of disk space.

------
sireat
Google Classroom is just a horrible horrible software (ahem SAAS) which is bad
at integrating with anything. Plus I have the feeling that any time I'd spend
trying to customize it for my students would be wasted because of Google
tendency to just depreciate things.

I recenty came back to Moodle after 10 year absence and it is not that bad by
comparison. Sure it has lots of warts (and I am sure the underlaying code is a
mess) but hey it's just a CRUD.

Worst case scenario I can hack around it.

I will probably get around to getting a program autograder for it.

------
mensetmanusman
Colleges could support this by having their programming students actively
develop and maintain software to support the education ecosystem. would be
great learnings for all

------
AdmiralAsshat
It would be nice...but I just don't see it working in practice.

Zoom was the best-positioned company in the world to handle the influx of
remote meetings when the pandemic started, and even they buckled under the
strain, at least initially. I can't imagine that Jitsi would be able to handle
the load if all schools switched over to it tomorrow, without a couple billion
dollars in additional funding.

~~~
MonadIsPronad
This note is perhaps conflating hardware with software. It sounds like a
reasonable solution to me for each university or school to have some small
server hardware running free software that supports their online needs.

~~~
larrywright
That’s a nice idea, but what happens when you have a situation like what
happened earlier this year? Every school sent their kids home and they went
fully remote. All of those software tools suddenly got a lot more use. If
school districts were relying on self hosted solutions, they’d have all had to
provision new hardware in a hurry. Hardware they likely don’t have budget for.
The reality is that cloud based software makes a lot more sense.

------
protomyth
Oh no, please no. The user interface is bad enough for all these parents just
trying to get their kids online and doing two things at once on a Chromebook.
I cannot imagine the support cost if they were using free software given
that's much harder to setup. Also, training is not going to happen. The UI
needs to be discoverable.

------
pascoej
I spent hours (dialup) downloading what I thought was powerpoint to work on a
school project as a kid and it turned out only to be a viewer. Unfortunately
buying MS Office wasn’t in the budget either so I was SOL.

Software in school should at least be gratis, which seems to be happening with
google docs et all.

------
colinrand
I think there is also a mismatch in current software development practices for
proprietary SaaS product versus what learning environment need. Modern SaaS
companies believe in updating their user experiences early and often i.e.
'continuous delivery vs. big bang' improvements. It's baked into our agile
thinking at our core now.

However, in the learning environment, the last thing you want is for the
platform to change in small, often subtle ways, that will confuse students and
teachers, forcing them to spend time not on the material of the lesson but on
the medium of the communications.

This causes significant and unnecessary frustration for all involved.

------
hindsightbias
I’ll ask the same question I’ve asked for 30 years. Maybe someone here has an
answer or link.

Is there any peer-reviewed evidence that computers in classrooms lead to
better outcomes?

I’ll cede the practical reality of the Covid era.

------
zerop
Had been a solo entrepreneur in edutech sector and I can tell you this may not
work. Schools need customisation, support and dont have IT expertise for
anything.

------
renewiltord
In the next century we will achieve a state where everyone writes software of
some sort. The best free software is built by people solving a problem for
themselves or for something they really understand. Stallman will never build
a good ed-tech suite. And today's teachers won't either. But the future
teachers, all of whom will know how to build some sort of software, will.

It is inevitable.

------
alan_n
Most kids could barely work the programs in my school let alone fix them. This
almost sounds like OSS wants to use the schools to create future bug fixers.

Also there isn't a one size fits all criteria (e.g. use the best software,
most popular, etc). My views on this are slightly different depending on the
situation.

\- Situation 1. The class is about teaching some piece of software (e.g.
graphic design, 3d, video editing). In that case the class should put an
emphasis on the common tools and techniques regardless of what program they
use. And contrary to what one would think just teaching more programs does not
help. I'm currently in a trade school and we have one software related class
and although they are doing the correct thing by teaching us using a variety
of programs, the kids still learn by memorizing steps instead of tools because
this is how they've always gotten by.

\- Situation 2. The software is secondary to the class (e.g. Teams/Zoom right
now for virtual classes). In this case the easiest to use and the most
appropriate for the job. In this case my school chose Teams and I think it's
been a pretty good experience compared to the horror stories I hear about Zoom
and custom implementations for exam taking at other schools.

------
dangus
Flawed from the first sentence, this article would have us all insist on free
software in a Sith world of absolutes.

Software is a tool like any other tool, and we all make trade-offs based on
our priorities.

...except for the folks like Richard Stallman. They’re willing to suffer
through bad solutions (or have the time and skills to write their own) just to
maintain this ideological line in the sand.

The thing is, people who have real jobs and aren’t just academics like
Stallman have to get shit done.

Sure, a lot of open source software is actually better than proprietary
alternatives. a lot of open source software is an easy choice.

I’d like to see Richard Stallman run a wedding photography business without
touching proprietary software. Or a restaurant. Or a scalable, highly
available SaaS company.

If he ever had a job that made him do any of those things, he’d quickly
realize that as CEO instead of chief computer tinkerer you suddenly start
making those trade-offs.

“I could pay 5 engineers devote 10% of their time to maintaining and patching
a monitoring system, or I can just buy Datadog.”

“I can spend 20% more time editing photos, or I can just buy Photoshop.”

“I can spend 20% of our IT person’s time maintaining our self-hosted video
conference solution and email server, or I can just buy G Suite.”

Schools are actually one of the worst places for open source software. K-12
institutions are not technical and need a ton of hand-holding. And if the
stuff breaks, your students will sit there twiddling their thumbs wasting
taxpayer dollars.

~~~
gr2zr4
Let me ask you: is Stallman talking about schools or businesses?

Just to be a little realistic: is there some "school activity" that makes
using closed-software mandatory because there isn't an open-source
alternative?

~~~
December_Stars
There's a few but those are quite prominent. Most notably I remember when I
took Physics 1 we used some very specific software which name I do not
remember but it was proprietary and only on Windows. Other than that almost
every class can be done entirely with free software, at least in HS.

~~~
gr2zr4
> very specific software which name I do not remember but it was proprietary
> and only on Windows

Because it was the only available software for that specific course or because
your teacher told you "this is the software, period"?

~~~
December_Stars
Pretty sure this was the only available software, iirc it was some Vernier
related thing.

~~~
Avamander
Yeah, buying hardware that has vendor-locks will lock you into that vendor's
software.

------
extremeMath
I think consumers and companies should go their best to shift to them too.

Most of our digital world is built on free code not proprietary crap.

~~~
gr2zr4
...and open-standards

------
SMAAART
Why would anyone pay for software?

In my company we use GSUite and - for those who need offline software -
LibreOffice works great!

------
ponker
No. There is almost no free application software that is better than the
proprietary equivalent, especially when operated by someone of average tech
fluency. The education of our children should not be the proving ground for
this effort.

(For systems software of course the Free alternatives are far superior but
that’s why nobody has to write essays in their defense).

~~~
Avamander
You're incorrect. BigBlueButton, Jitsi, Moodle and others are just as usable
to kids.

It's the teachers that are computer-illiterate and have issues with
_everything_ that they haven't been taught how to use.

------
brighton36
This assumes we know what schools are for. :(

~~~
MiscIdeaMaker99
Would you please elaborate?

~~~
brighton36
I guess that was a bit terse. NPR did a series called 'nice white parents'
that went over some of these issues. But, the central question is basically
"what is the goal here" . Do kids belong to the state, and the state decides
what's best? (and what's involved there) Do kids belong to the parents, and
parents decide what's best? What is education? Do we want them job ready? What
if these are zero sum games. etc.

------
puskavi
Computer science in here is basically windblows office training. fucking sad.

------
fenesiistvan
As a software developer who lives from selling software licenses, I don't
really like this free and open source movement.

------
GoToRO
I'm sorry but free software it's just a very big tree that is rooted at 0
dollars. That means that nothing can grow under that tree, no cheap
alternatives will be feasible. So free software just makes everything
expensive. I have yet to see a casual user crazy about any free application
yet.

~~~
dotancohen

        > I have yet to see a casual user crazy about any
        > free application yet.
    

Invite me to dinner if you haven't heard about VIM yet.

~~~
GoToRO
casual user heard about vim? no way!

------
OneGuy123
> They are intensely curious to read the source code of the programs that they
> use every day.

I can't remember ever wanting that.

> Proprietary software rejects their thirst for knowledge: it says, “The
> knowledge you want is a secret—learning is forbidden!”

I can't ever remember thinking that.

> How do natural-born programmers learn to be good programmers? They need to
> read and understand real programs that people really use.

Real program != well written program.

This article makes so many statements in the form of "You must do X because of
Y otherwise you are immoral" that if any of those would actually be true 99%
of programmers today should not be able to exist by his logic.

~~~
MonadIsPronad
Anecdotally, I can certainly relate strongly to the quotes you pointed out.

