
Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software - gnu
https://www.gnu.org/education/teaching-my-mit-classes-with-only-free-libre-software.html
======
neilv
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 example to software engineering
students that this is doable.

Also, MIT is one of the original homes of various FLOSS ideas, and if they
can't manage to use FLOSS, who can? So maybe there's additional sense of
professional obligation. And after he did it, it was written up, to encourage
others to try it.

~~~
dreamcompiler
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.

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

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

~~~
dreamcompiler
My intent was to elaborate on the parent's phrase "For a professor to use only
FLOSS when teaching CS students...", not to accuse him/her of ignorance. If my
use of the word "just" sounded argumentative, I apologize.

------
nanna
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.

~~~
dreamcompiler
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 not allowed to purchase books
written by their faculty. Or if the Stanford EE department was not allowed to
equip their buildings with low-voltage LED lighting they had invented.

And yet we just accept that a leading computer science department at a major
university can be forced to use crap enterprise software that's vastly
inferior to anything they themselves could have written.

Some of my examples might be hyperbolic. But the power of IT departments to
mandate a dumbed-down status quo still seems very weird to me. I believe it's
one of the factors that keeps computer science and engineering from making
more forward progress.

~~~
bberenberg
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.

~~~
dreamcompiler
> John Deere does not make ATVs, they don't make any tier of people moving
> equipment.

They most assuredly do, which is why I came up with that example.

[https://www.deere.com/en/gator-utility-
vehicles/](https://www.deere.com/en/gator-utility-vehicles/)

~~~
bberenberg
You're right, I didn't see these when I checked their site.

At the same time, I stand by my argument that there is often a great reason
why you want to standardize. For example, do you want a cyclical dependency in
your production stream. If there is a defect in your people movers, and you
need those people movers to operate, you now have to split the newly produced
people mover parts for fixing your production equipment vs getting them out to
customers.

The point I am making isn't that IT is some bastion of brilliance and
operational excellence. They're mediocre at it. And this is a good thing, not
a bad thing.

As orgs scale, you want to be less nimble because any given success or failure
is amplified. If a 10 person company screws up and goes out of business it
sucks but it's not a big deal. 800 people? That's enough to get a presidential
candidate to visit your campus to speak about the important of retaining jobs.

People underestimate the impact of the work we do in tech. Another thread on
HN today pointed me to [https://medium.com/better-marketing/pepsis-40-billion-
typo-c...](https://medium.com/better-marketing/pepsis-40-billion-typo-caused-
deadly-riots-3d671295d1bd) which I think is a great example. A simple software
bug led to 18 million in loses, huge brand damage, and deaths of people
involved in the protests.

~~~
dreamcompiler
I understand your point. There's value in standardization. But there's also
huge value in eating your own dog food. When IT prevents dogfooding entirely,
it's gone too far.

~~~
bberenberg
I think we agree. The hard part here is to figure out where to strike that
balance.

------
zelphirkalt
Obviously 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.

~~~
marta_morena_24
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 to support some ideology.

~~~
kragen
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.)

~~~
bildung
_> celebrate the mass human sacrifice of the Khmer Rouge killing fields as an
inspiring example of class struggle, as MIT professor Noam Chomsky did_

This obviously never happened. What Chomsky and Herman instead did was
criticizing the media portrayals of the Khmer Rouge vs. the US bombings that
took place at the same time, killing 600000 civilians in Cambodia
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freedom_Deal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freedom_Deal)).

~~~
kragen
I appreciate the correction. You are partly correct; Chomsky did not in fact
celebrate the sacrifices, but rather urged people to doubt their reality, in
1977, at which point doubting them was perhaps more reasonable than it is
today:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chomsky_and_Herman)
[https://chomsky.info/19770625/](https://chomsky.info/19770625/)

That article was written before the worst of the killings happened in 1978,
though it still seems outrageous to me that it blames the bad conditions in
Cambodia on US bombings killing water buffalo; Chomsky touts "the destructive
American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries
in overcoming it" and describes reports that “virtually everybody saw the
consequences of [summary executions] in the form of the corpses of men, women
and children rapidly bloating and rotting in the hot sun,” as "fallacious",
saying that they "collapse[] under the barest scrutiny".

The US bombings were indeed terrible, but (as the page you link explains) they
did not kill anywhere close to the 600k people you claim, and they happened
earlier than the Khmer Rouge killing fields, not at the same time.

I have corrected my comment to instead make the more defensible, though still
perhaps controvertible, claim that _Pol Pot_ celebrated the sacrifices in that
way.

------
ffdixon1
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 have been deeply integrated
into many of the most popular learning management systems. Our road map will
continue of focus on the teacher/student engagement. Needless to say, Covid-19
made a _lot_ people take a closer look at BigBlueButton. We've been working on
it for 10+ years now, and we're _very_ determined to make it the most
effective platform for virtual classrooms and build upon our community.

~~~
gnu
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.

~~~
ffdixon1
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.

~~~
gnu
Awesome! Thanks.

------
craigsmansion
I think one of the nicer points to take away here is that prof. Sussman worked
around remote teaching problems not by getting bogged down in meetings, but by
calling a friendly admin and by himself installing a piece of free software on
a computer he had lying around in his lab.

Free Software gives you back the agency to solve your problems in any way you
see fit(be they hacks or not). It doesn't leave you helpless and dependent on
the goodwill of third parties.

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

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

~~~
Shared404
Unfortunately, still an effective limit of FL/OSS software.

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

------
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](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/...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-
text/book/book.html)

\- Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics -
[https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/structure-and-
interpretation-...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/structure-and-
interpretation-classical-mechanics-second-edition)

\- Functional Differential Geometry -
[https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-differential-
geome...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-differential-geometry)

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

------
noobermin
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.

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

~~~
remexre
This actually surprises me, with how cruddy it is, I assumed it was
proprietary... My uni switched to canvas from Moodle, to the general detriment
of anyone without fast internet and a fast PC.

~~~
servilio
Do you know if they are using the a hosted version or hosting it themselves?

------
rgrau
A bit tangential to the main topic, but I can't wait for that book to be out.
IIRC (I read it somewhere??) it's based on his 'Robust Systems' thoughts and
experiments.

Total mystery here: [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-
flexibility](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-flexibility)

You can dip your toe here:
[https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/)

------
cellularmitosis
> 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)

Looking forward to this!!!

------
xrisk
The instructor is also one of the authors of SICP.

~~~
barking
Nice to see that he is still teaching, having seen his videos from 1986 when
he as already a professor I presume.

------
spicyramen
Thanks to open source projects students are able to learn, experiment and
grow. I was lucky enough to have one of our professors introduced me to
Asterisk for VoIP calls. Being able to learn and modify the code base and
contribute back to the community are skills which helped me grow as a
professional

------
pfortuny
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.

...

~~~
renewiltord
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

~~~
woofie11
... 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.

~~~
Nebasuke
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.

~~~
woofie11
It turns out Google isn't as good as talking to people. If you'd like a
confirmation, e-mail a one-line question to him:

"Hi. I'm interested in how elite schools hire people. Would MIT hire someone
like you (as you were when you were hired) today?"

(1) Please don't reference this conversation. (2) Please keep it short.
Jerry's super-approachable, but MIT professors get a ton of cold-calls. 40
words tops. (3) If you are MIT-affiliated, mention that. You'll be more likely
to get a response.

Or if you'd like more background, call him on the phone (yes, those exist) and
see if he has time for a chat. He'll always find time to talk to MIT students
(current and former), but for others, it depends on how busy he is.

Life skill: Cold-call interesting people. You can learn a lot that way.

------
fsloth
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
own domain is difficult enough for one person to cope with).

So here I think is the line where it makes "sense" to use a free software in
university teaching setting, or not. If a considerable percentage of the
students are likely able to move beyond to the "black magic box" model of
software to investigating actually the CS principles behind the software, then
using a free stack is definetly beneficial for the education.

If the students anyway treat the software as a black box, then it makes sense
to use a black box that is pedagogically most prudent, free or not.

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

~~~
fsloth
Do you have concrete examples of this?

~~~
fsckboy
you changed the verb tense; if you matched mine you would ask "would you have
examples".

but to answer your question, yes, every time LibreOffice, Firefox, or Apache
is used in a third world medical context.

------
eddieoz
I used BigBlueButton between 2010-2013 for remote training classes on OZ
Technology.

The infrastructure was built over AWS, automatically stopping the servers
after all people leaving the channels. For starting it, it was monitoring the
training schedule and 'opening/loading' the channel a few moments before the
class start.

Cheap, open-source and reliable.

~~~
chiefsucker
AWS doesn’t necessary sound like OSS, but to each his own ;)

It’s definitely great that such an architecture worked for you and also shows
how hard it can be to run a full OSS stack these days.

------
p4bl0
That is nice and all but I fail to see how it is particular: the situation
described here is also what me and most of my colleagues did during this
period (except we used instances of these software hosted by our own
university). I believe it is the same in most universities.

~~~
kkylin
I think most universities (MIT included, and certainly mine) went directly to
Zoom or something like it. GJS wanted to show you can do this with FOSS.

~~~
kleiba
In my university, it's Microsoft all the way.

------
agalunar
I'd also recommend _Libre Tools for Teaching_

[https://hz.mit.edu/thoughts/teaching_with_libre_software.htm...](https://hz.mit.edu/thoughts/teaching_with_libre_software.html)

which discusses the tools that were used to run one of MIT's introductory
programming course online (due to coronavirus).

------
ngcc_hk
Is there free software alternative to zoom?

------
systemvoltage
What’s wrong with paying for a product or a service if it’s better for my
students? Isn’t the teacher’s job to find the best available tools for their
students and not engage in some kind of open source software usage high score?

Edit: People are getting downvoted left and right. Why is this such a
polarizing topic?

~~~
Hitton
>What’s wrong with paying for a product or a service if it’s better for my
students? Isn’t the teacher’s job to find the best available tools for their
students

There is nothing wrong with paying for something, but what's better is
relative.

Isn't it better to not give away students' private information? Isn't it also
better for CS students to be able to look at the source code of tools they are
using? Inevitably you will need to choose some metric with which you'll
measure quality of a software, that metric is subjective. This guy chose one
which valued aforementioned qualities more, if you teach your own class you
are free to choose software which better fulfills your subjective criteria.

~~~
systemvoltage
I pay for SublimeText because I genuinely feel like paying for it - think
about it - why does someone go out of their way to spend money on something
they wouldn’t feel is “better”? I agree that criteria of what’s better is
subjective but regardless, I don’t think it’s saying anything my stance on
open source software.

------
mellosouls
_It made available licenses for various nonfree programs, but I objected to
them on grounds of principle._

I hope he also objected to taking payment for his own services on grounds of
principle, lest people think of him as rather sanctimonious.

~~~
ranaexmachina
Not getting payed is not the point of free software.

------
raister
I 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 getting weird messages. Download the source
files, ./configure, make, make install multiple times adding different
parameters, add new repositories to apt, try to download the right packages,
end up installing the latest Python3.8.9, and other things I don't want. And
the software still not works.

Oh boy. Something is got to change in making software.

~~~
TheDong
Have I got some nixpkgs to sell you then :)

Really though, with the nix package manager
([https://nixos.org/](https://nixos.org/)), if anyone at any point in time had
a working nix package for a given program, and as long as all the inputs
(source code) are still either online or cached somewhere with the same
sha256, it's possible to get the exact same output.

This works with very few exceptions. Some things, like systemd dbus calls,
runtime calls to an internet api that might have changed, other runtime impure
things, will of course be exceptions. But in general, there aren't other
exceptions. It doesn't matter if your computer has python3.9 installed, nix
doesn't mind using python3.6.5 for one old package.

So yeah, nix solves exactly the problem you're complaining about. I agree
something's broken in other distros, but nix fixes it.

Note, others will say containers solve this, and that's also sorta true. If
someone had a docker image laying around with exactly that version of software
installed and working, and you can still download said image, you'll get a
working setup that way. But actually rebuilding the container (unless it's
built with nix) is unlikely to be as nicely reproducible, and it misses some
nice properties as a result.

Also, I can see why you might get downvoted since this isn't really that
relevant to the post. It's not just free software that suffers from the
problem of shipping and packaging software being a space full of
unreproducibility and incompatibility

~~~
diffeomorphism
That doesn't fix anything but just pushes the problem further down the road.
You are simply not upgrading the python version and running the identical
three year old version.

------
md5person
What'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 developing software. Is asking for compensation
for one's time and effort somehow wrong?

And in many cases, proprietary/commercial software really does outperform the
equivalent FOSS/Libre solution. Why are we teaching people to reach out for
the suboptimal tools in these situations?

~~~
Symbiote
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.

~~~
barking
Who wrote the Four freedoms and how does he put food on the table?

~~~
fsflover
[https://fsf.org](https://fsf.org)

~~~
barking
If you're just some guy who writes and updates a piece of software for a
living, what do you do then?

~~~
vertex-four
You find people willing to pay for your work, not for a license. If your
ongoing work is not worth anything, why should you be paid extra for work you
did in the past?

~~~
barking
>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?

~~~
vertex-four
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-source anyway. You can write an MVP, pitch
it to potential clients, and write software that provides value to them.
That's what I'm doing.

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

~~~
vertex-four
Yes, copyright is unethical, as is closed-source distribution. Sell actual
work - there's _always_ work to be done on or around software. My project is
livestreaming software, but it turns out there's plenty of folks who don't
want to set up livestreaming software, they just want to pay someone for the
result of having a solid branded stream - so my business model is providing
them that end. If I could do it reasonably with existing software, I would,
but I can't, so I'm writing software for it.

~~~
barking
And there's nothing to stop someone else letting you write all the code and
get paid for the bit you charge for, right. In fact they could work full time
on that while you have to spend time doing software updates/maintenance etc.

~~~
vertex-four
If I'm not making money off it, I'm going to stop writing it and find
something else to do, obviously?

Being able to say "I have deep technical knowledge of this domain, proven by
the fact that I _literally wrote the software_ and can customise it to your
needs" is worth something, unsurprisingly.

~~~
barking
How could a programmer of great ability ever become wealthy living by your
ethics?

~~~
Kim_Bruning
I think you're assuming that most software work is confection.

In reality, or at least in my case, pretty much all the money I've ever earned
was in doing bespoke work.

You _could_ see contributions to FLOSS as loss leaders; though that wouldn't
be accurate, since there are definitely benefits beyond just advertising your
skills.

A key benefit: if there is a set of freelancers working around a single FLOSS
code-base, each of them actually benefits by contributing back; because the
shared code-base increases in quantity and quality, and thus leads to
competitive advantage for all.

~~~
barking
I've never done any software consulting/contracting but I can see the sense in
what you say.

------
gcatalfamo
While commendable, I don’t think this approach is useful. I also had a
professor that only wanted to use FOSS for its students but the reality is
that university should prepare - at least to a certain degree - for work.

The radicalization of this approach leads to students that land their first
job without knowing how enterprise commercial software work lacking therefore
a very useful entry level skill.

~~~
badsectoracula
I do not think the job of universities is to teach how to use any specific
piece of software - be it enterprise, commercial, proprietary, free or not.
That software changes and often different between companies, so what should be
learned is knowledge that applies regardless of software.

And TBH i do not see why a university should provide free (or worse, paid[0])
advertisement material for a commercial product.

[0] i mean paid by the software companies and it is worse because usually the
students either paid for the admission to the university, meaning they paid to
get advertised to, or they enrolled in a public university, meaning the
taxpayers paid money to have their children advertised to

~~~
wiz21c
It is the job of university to participate in what our future will be. In that
sense, I'm all for universities to push student in a direction or in another
(provided that direction doesn't put them in difficulty later in their live).

IMHO, you don't advertise free software. Because free software is not
commercial per se. Advertisement is for commercial products (and with a bit of
sarcasm, I'd say that most commercial software need advertisement either
because they don't have enough value either because they just want to be
bigger than the other; in both case, the mankind is not well served).

>>> the taxpayers paid money to have their children advertised to

spot on.

------
andi999
I am a fan of open software, and also a realist. I think what he did is great.
My only concern is that the source code in the book is gpl licensed (and not
MIT or better public domain). This means for the student taking the class he
technically is not allowed to use anything later in his work life (except of
course he works for an open source company, which only a few do, bigger
exception if the company uses the software only inhouse - but then he is in
the EE department, so this means most students might work on products later).

~~~
speedgoose
Once Richard Stallman gave me a GPLv3 sticker. I have been contaminated and I
can only write GPLv3 since.

~~~
gspr
Think of all the cells you have grown since then. Consider this a formal
written request for your DNA :-)

Yeah, the author of the comment you're replying to is either a troll or has no
idea how copyright works.

