Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software
gnu.org
gnu.org
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.
And even if someone has only used Libre Office in school, I'd say the school has done a pretty piss poor job in general if the grad can't pick up MS Word (or GSuite etc.) pretty quickly. Companies change the apps they use for specific purposes all the time and employees need to be able to adjust.
Most regulated businesses are big corporations with attached bureaucracies.
When they get a lawsuit because somebody was injured, what will happen is an analysis how this bug could occur.
If it is found that the problem was caused by a library or third party that could get sued, the corporation will sue them and get their money back.
If they find there's no one to sue like with FOSS, they will likely start regulating the use of FOSS.
This has the perverse effect that after a lot of iterations of this cycle the whole toolchain is designed for "sueability" not for quality, performance, or any other worthy goal. Further the toolchain becomes increasingly opaque and proprietary.
Even though the proprietary software has more bugs, and they're harder to find due to their closed source nature, the leaders of Big Corp have covered their asses. The engineers build more workarounds and spend less time improving the quality of Big Corp's code base. The quality of the product suffers. But none of it is the fault of anyone. That's what's important.
He mentions that classes were broadcast with Jitsi Meet - but has anyone else used that and can comment on quality for a large class - say when doing Q&A in class?
You're the only person who said 'just'! You're arguing against something you said.
Your comment could be taken out of context here. I am no language expert, but it's better to use the form "Sussman is not only a professor at MIT, but also ...".
"just" is probably overused these days. It has replaced words like "please" and structures like above.
Contrast:
a) Can you just do that
b) Can you please get that
Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot.
Student participation in some of the projects could work for certain modules, but only as experiments -- again we've been specifically prohibited from spinning up our own solutions.
> Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot.
I agree that ultimately what needs to happen is that those of us who care about FLOSS need to organise and try to chip away at the corporate one-size-fits-all dependency syndrome at the university. The kinds of data ownership debates happening in Germany seem very far off here. The British university is in retreat. [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/10/uk-univers...
If the UK universities are anything like the US universities this is near impossible to do. Maybe COVID has changed some things but when I worked in the university system (state run) it was more about who could woo what administrator. The amount of waste and nepotism would make your head spin.
Right now everythings in emergency mode anyway so as far as they're concerned outsourcing everything to Microsoft is one less problem. Everything can be justified by the state of exception.
Kudos to MIT for leaving their staff to make such calls for themselves. I know Sussman is a superstar but still. I'm sure a culture like that helps contribute to MIT being the world's most highly ranked university.
One thing about Big Blue Button though: a friend teaches in a smallish university and has been trying to find out how to get simple, turnkey hosted installations of it (the IT department is not interested). It seems inordinately difficult to simply create an account with one of the listed hosters on the page and start paying. The big draw of BBB is the whiteboarding feature.
The alternative is Jisti Meet with the "Presenter" mode sharing a LibreOffice window, which actually works pretty well, but would be better if it were possible to toggle on/off the thumbnail of the presenter (it currently occupies about the lower right ninth of the screen).
Jitsi Meet is so far (out of Teams, BlueJeans (no linux desktop client and therefore no whiteboard), BBB) the best.
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.
Thanks for writing this.
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.
They most assuredly do, which is why I came up with that example.
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... 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.
Calling an action unethical is a strong accusation. It's very rude to call an action or a person unethical unless the wrongness of that action goes way beyond merely not taking advantage of an opportunity to facilitate some ethical goal, calling it unethical implies some active wrongdoing instead of failing or refusing to take what you consider the most beneficial choice.
1. For any scale of "ethicality" what matters is not only the actual scale, but also the "zero point". On a hypothetical scale of -10 to +10, there's a lot of choices that are not the most ethical choice providing the most utility or making no sins or whatever model of ethics is used, but are "above zero" - so they are ethical actions (ethically permitted actions) despite not being most ethical choices. Most things that we do fall in the range between, say, 0 and +5 on that arbitrary, hypothetical scale - they're ethically permitted but far from the "most ethical" possible acts. E.g. it's ethical to try and follow the effective altruism movement principles; but it's also definitely ethical to perfrom ordinary altruism.; it's ethical to abandon your life and go to a poor country to feed starving people, but it's also ethically permissible to not do that and simply live a good life. Otherwise we might as well say that everyone who's not devoting their life to charity is unethical, and that's not what the word means.
2. To adjust for moral relativism - there are many moral standards, however, even in moral relativism we (or at least I) expect them to be mostly aligned. E.g. what's +7 for you might be +10 or +5 for me, but it's very unlikely to be -7. If someone's personal ethics or religious persuasion allows and even mandates them to, for example, rape and kill babies, then we simply mark their relative morals as unacceptable (unaligned?) and invalid despite generally accepting some relativism. And relativism is tricky - we do accept some relativism - if someone asserts that not following their exact moral code to the letter (which most of the society doesn't do) automatically makes someone (e.g. most of the society) immoral and evil, then we consider their morals, or at least that part of their morals, as not aligned with widely accepted morals, extremist, not valid, and ignore it. I.e. the "privileges" of moral relativism seem to be granted only to those who also grant others the same privilege.
So I'm working with the expectation of not-absolutely-objective but still somewhat aligned moral principles, making an assumption that if something seems definitely permissible for me; i.e. not even close to 0, far from the (admittedly fuzzy) line of what's permitted and required in my opinion; then for others with different-but-still-reasonable ethical priorities it might be, at worst, mildly discouraged but not breaking any major taboos.
3. Calling someone unethical or immoral is a strong accusation. It is justified if and only if the action goes "below zero" on that scale; if the agent has broken some taboos or significant moral principles. It's not appropriate if the agent has merely acted unoptimally or "less ethically" as they could. It's appropriate if the agent has failed in some ethical duty, if some evil act was done, but it's not appropriate if the agent has failed in some ethical "opportunity", if they did not do something that is nice but not morally mandated.
4. Teaching someone how to use an useful proprietary tool is not unethical. Teaching someone useful skills is a good act that helps that student, does not impose any undue harm, does not violate any person's rights or moral imperative, it's strictly "above zero" on a moral scale even if it would have been more good or "more ethical" to do something else e.g. teach some free software instead. All the arguments made above for ethicalness of teaching free software instead of proprietary tools go into the category of "it would have been better to do that instead", there was no argument made that teaching proprietary tools is actually harmful or evil, and that there's some specific harm to society that outweighs the benefit to the student. So I did not see any actual justification why the act should be considered unethical (only assertion that doing something else might be better), but there was an assertion that anyone doing so is unethical.
5. Unjust accusations are harmful. It's offensive, harming people without appropriate reason or justification, and harming people does violate most moral principles. I assume that this is not what's being debated here - I would assume that the grandparent poster would agree that unjust accusations are harmful but would rather contest/debate the position is that these accusations are just; they might question my #4 assertion, but not this one - however, I might be mistaken, of course.
6. I'm not asserting that you should not call out unethical actors because that would offend them; there's nothing ethically wrong with just or justified accusations even if they turn out erroneous because of a honest mistake. But I am asserting that in any reasonable debate it's appropriate, polite and even an ethical imperative to give some benefit of doubt (not "innocent before proven guilty" beyond all doubt criteria, we're not proposing to execute or imprisin someone, but at least some reasonable benefit of doubt) before making any accusations. This requires some serious consideration whether that act is actually unethical (according to the criteria of #1) or it's merely less-than-optimal e.g. failing to signal some support to an ethical movement.
7. I am asserting that making unjust accusations of unethicality is itself unethical (i.e. not just suboptimal, but "below 0 on that scale", breaking moral imperatives). This is a much wider issue than this debate on free software, I've seen such accusations of unethicality very frequently misused (IMHO even intentionally) in recent political debates on both side, and I believe that this misuse of accusations is harmful behavior.
Going back to your particular example of the statement "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.", it is something that seems reasonable to me - it's permissible to call out unethical actors (though note the abovementioned difference between calling out actually unethical actors versus claiming that an actor is unethical without any grounds to do so), and it's permissible to not call out unethical actors; I don't see any contradiction there.
This was the second sentence of the post
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.)
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).
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.
It’s important to understand and try to find why that person is thinking this way than to shut them down in the manner you have, again with the same subjective ideology that the parent is commenting on.
Yeah? Try it, then.
Think about, the other person is not stupid to feel so passionate or strongly about something. There must beSome reason. Peel the layers until you get to the bottom of it. IMO, that’s so much more interesting to study than to ignore them.
Humanity gets better when we try to get out of a local optima. When we do don’t explore radical voices, and instead ignore them, we have no possible way to wiggle out of the uncanny valley. This refactoring if you will, of the human progress guided by logical reasoning, understanding of trade offs, gathering empirical data and studying behavior is paramount to a peaceful and harmonious society.
I urge you to please listen to others and ask them why they think that way. What are the pros and cons of a particular approach. Be honest and seek truth.
Moreover, what they are attacking is that Sussman is enabling his students to study the software the course is run on, so they can understand its tradeoffs and guide human progress by logical reasoning, rather than treating the software as impenetrable black boxes they are forbidden to investigate and powerless to change; and they are attacking MIT's adherence to the ideology of academic freedom, one of the most effective ways to explore radical voices, get out of local optima, and seek truth.
I notice that you still haven't posted a response to their comment, whether criticizing their dishonesty as your stance implies you should, or attempting to understand their point of view as you are urging me to do. If you think it's important to find out why that person is thinking this way, then why are you making no effort to do so, instead attempting to influence me?
My best guess is that you're just feeding me a line of bullshit that you think will persuade me, rather than saying anything you sincerely believe, since your behavior in this thread is precisely the opposite of the behavior you are advocating.
Or, more briefly: "Yeah? Try it, then."
At least until we reach the bloat level of the web.
It also sets a baseline for every student and prepares them for a future where science is made to be shared and part of that is using tools and work flows that can be copied around the world.
>if the only way of doing science is by using expensive apps only available to rich individuals or companies that are well off, well its quite limiting in who can gain an attractive amount of experience working with it.
The same might be said of all the expensive hardware and other facilities required for many STEM (and even other) courses. Electron microscopes and MRI machines (and exotic computer hardware) are scarce resources however you look at it.
So while it is understandable that hardware will be limiting and that cannot really be helped, software should never be a limiting factor in education imho. One can never remove all obstacles, but the easily avoidable ones should be avoided.
Btw., similar arguments apply to books, there is no reason digital versions of books used in education shouldn't be free (as in beer and freedom).
Second, there are a lot of contexts where MIT's educational materials are available for free (gratis). I've taken a lot of MIT courses over the years and never paid a dime except to purchase a hard copy of SICP.
Unrelated to this story, but on the topic of ethics in CS: I found the decision of Joe Redmon [1] extremely brave. (If you don't know who he is, he's the principle original author of YOLO, and could easily have had a stellar CV career. Also, his papers are just amazing reads with tons of humor.)
[1] https://syncedreview.com/2020/02/24/yolo-creator-says-he-sto...
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.
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)?
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.
Not the software's fault, but still still a limit.
I'm very excited for this. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-flexibility
For reference, Sussman is an author of Scheme and
- SICP https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...
- Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/structure-and-interpretation-...
- Functional Differential Geometry - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-differential-geome...
All of which are available free online (look for the open access tab)
Not only that, I’ve discovered some minor exploits in my time using it. For what it is, it’s horrible software and none of my professors were ever happy to use it.
Based on the ancient aolserver?
Total mystery here: 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/
Looking forward to this!!!
At my school, first thing: disconnect all your servers except for required lavoratory things.
...
A. MIT is as renowned as it is
B. MIT does this
C. MIT has people like Gerald Sussman as Professors
... MIT is going down the tubes.
... And people like Jerry (correctly) say MIT would never hire someone like them today.
I tried to search for the statement that MIT would not hire someone like Jerry, but I could not find it myself.
"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.
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.
but to answer your question, yes, every time LibreOffice, Firefox, or Apache is used in a third world medical context.
So yeah, there's a lot of room for improvement. Hospitals are unlikely to switch to a new system but new doctors might be open to free software. They need expert support for it though. Encrypted cloud storage services for medical data and images would add a lot of value but I'm not sure if that's legal.
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.
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.
https://hz.mit.edu/thoughts/teaching_with_libre_software.htm...
which discusses the tools that were used to run one of MIT's introductory programming course online (due to coronavirus).
Edit: People are getting downvoted left and right. Why is this such a polarizing topic?
Of course, because there's a material cost for manufacturing physical things. The marginal cost of "manufacturing" copies of digital information after the information is created the first time is the price of the electrons it takes to perform that copy, so very close to zero.
I think everyone agrees there's a real weight of responsibility on teachers. Some feel that getting students onboard with FOSS is the responsible choice.
Free software is like physical goods with Right to Repair. In the olden days, if you bought a radio, it came with a service manual and a schematic.
It's how many people learned EE, and it was a huge loss when that went away. People maintained their own stuff. People tinkered. That's how Sussman learned to EE too.
That's an analogy to free software exactly, 100%, and spot-on.
The hardware developer still gets to feed their children with an income.
Even in an extreme hypothetical -- if the government were to mandate that all software be free software -- only a minority of software developers would lose their jobs. Banks still need to manage transactions. Employers still need to manage payroll. Google still needs to serve up ads and search results. And I don't want to host AWS myself. Those organizations will continue to pay to build software.
There's a huge bit of confusion that the word 'free' somehow means you don't get paid. It doesn't. It turns out if the source code pops up on github under a GPL license, most of the time, the world just keeps on ticking.
There are exceptions, of course -- companies like Adobe would likely disappear -- but for 90+% of jobs in software, whether it's free software or proprietary impacts your ability to make money not-at-all.
The most successful organization I helped found was almost exclusively free software. There were hundreds of people using our platform as open source, and zero of them competed with us head-on. The only differences were: (1) our customers trusted us a lot more (if we went away, they wouldn't be SOL) (2) we had a massive amount of engineering work done on someone else's dime.
In more senior roles, or even being more assertive in most junior roles, I could usually release what I was working on as free software by asking. Right now, of the programming work I do, about 90% is free software. The organization I work at is probably 95% proprietary software. The value of keeping me around + good PR + possible contributions + ... is much higher than the value of having exclusive rights to source code that I write.
A turbine simulation package costs $250k a year in license and it is specifically tailored for our wind turbine nacelle loads, configuration and wind farm layout.
If they just give out this software for free but provide support, I am not sure if that would be sustainable. They can provide the source code for inspection ("visible code" not "open source code") if that's what your concern is. Most esoteric software don't care about the visibility of their code. It is just the right to use it freely that they opposite and I feel like rightfully so.
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.
Likely because there's only so many times someone wants to reply with "Free as in free market, not as in free lunch."
And it's not that much of a polarising topic, but if Gerald Jay Sussman, professor at MIT, co-writer of SICP, board-member of the FSF, writes about "Free Software", and multiple people start off with complaints or comments about "paying", even if there have been multiple posts and corrections in the commentary already, it becomes very hard to retain good faith or discern any value in the post.
I hope he also objected to taking payment for his own services on grounds of principle, lest people think of him as rather sanctimonious.
Oh boy. Something is got to change in making software.
Really though, with the nix package manager (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
Because this is not relevant with the topic at all?
How does this relate in any way to "proprietary vs free/libre" software used in classes?
Open source sw these days: several versions, constant tweaking, works so-so (depends on the software), semi-professional developers working on it (I am not saying they're not good) or amateurs (with amateur designs), not for profit, of course. EDIT: remove double 'multiple versions'.
OSS: You can still manage to sorta make it work
I guess my point is, if the software GP talked about was proprietary, he wouldn't have known what was wrong in the first place.
This is exactly why the proprietary software like Windows is so bad for you
For the case of numpy, some pretty obscure functions must have been used then. Usually there will be deprecation warnings ahead of time and a bit ofsearching will clear up, what you should use instead, going with later versions. Also they don't simply remove the dot product or something.
So that's why I think an example would help your post and make people understand that specific case.
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?
What if people were paid through public grants, or paid well through the welfare state; instead of through the legal scarcity provided by intellectual property?
Typically those who utilize open software for commercial ends contribute code. Opensource contributors are hired by companies using their software.
Sure, but conveniently enough, the software listed in the parent article [0] all happens to be "free as in beer".
What examples of "free as in freedom, but we had to pay for it before we could use it" software was used during the course?
[0] https://www.gnu.org/education/teaching-my-mit-classes-with-o...
We're discussing an educational institution with power and authority (MIT), which promotes drinking "free coffee", whilst simultaneously portraying it as somehow morally superior to "coffee one has to pay for" to consume.
Growing and selling coffee takes time, labour and effort - yet none of that is being reflected or accounted for when we choose to not pay for the coffee we consume.
Is this a sustainable approach? Does it promote "choosing the right tool for the job", or does it promote blind idealism ("free is better")? And why does a university, which takes exorbitant tuition fees, not prioritize the best software for the course (over the one that's merely free)?
Free software is morally superior, see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor.... It provides specific rights to the user so that the user is in control of their computing and not the developers.
> Is this a sustainable approach? Does it promote "choosing the right tool for the job", or does it promote blind idealism ("free is better")?
How to decide what is "blind idealism" and what is "normal idealism"?
Your coffee-response is all wrong: this is not about "free" coffee, about (not) having to pay for coffee, but about a moral stance on coffee: e.g. demanding the cafetaria only serves Fair Trade coffee, regardless of the price.
This is not about "having to pay for it" at all. The opposite really: running your own jitsi or BigBlueButton is probably more expensive than using the free tier of Teams, Zoom or Hangouts.
I run a large-ish jitsi instance: approx €50/month just for the VPS, my hours probably add another €2000/month to that.
Why are we going back-and-forth about this again?
I previously asked whether there were concrete examples of software used during the course that were "free as in freedom" but NOT "free as in beer", and the response to my question was that no such examples were available.
It's the actions that matter here, and the bottom line is that they weren't intending to pay for anything to begin with. And by that, they were abdicating the "it's not about the money" argument, in my honest opinion.
That's an entirely meaningless argument. Here's what you're doing:
> "I run a large-ish jitsi instance: approx €50/month just for the VPS, my hours probably add another €2000/month to that."
Here's what Sussman is doing:
> "I used a Jitsi Meet server that I installed on an obsolete and otherwise useless computer that was sitting idle in my laboratory, on its way to the electronics junk heap."
The two scenarios are not comparable.
I'm not making exaggerated claims here. The University can absolutely afford to do better, the students (who pay exorbitant tuition fees) deserve better, and any "libre software" idealism here is simply people trying to cut costs, jeopardizing the quality of education and the overall experience, while touting moralistic superiority...
Distance learning, for example, could've been a much more widespread and accepted thing, had it not been for instructors cobbling up together scrapyard-bound hardware to use as a chat server. Coming up with a proper solution takes investing (time, money, expertise) - which some people will evidently avoid at all costs...
Which is to say Sussman could effectively, for the purposes of this course, get _any_ license for free-as-in-beer.
So the actual decision would purely be on some other grounds. Since Sussman is a world renowned CS teacher, I choose to believe he made his choice based solely on whether it was most suitable to teaching CS.
(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.
I wish! Good joke! (I hope it was?) For those who believe otherwise -> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/27538183_For_Money_...
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.
The price does not enter into Sussman's argument. Maybe it could, given how students tend to be short on money and abhor paying for expensive textbooks, but it doesn't.
> Growing and selling coffee takes time, labour and effort - yet none of that is being reflected or accounted for when we choose to not pay for the coffee we consume.
In my coffee analogy, the promotion of the fair-trade alternative would be based on the fair-trade mechanism for ensuring the lower levels of the production chain receive a fairer share of the income. Whether or not the author pays less or more at the store is irrelevant to the argument.
> Is this a sustainable approach?
For this class? Almost surely!
For some people (e.g. me)? To a large extent (things aren't black and white). Apart from (the admittedly large chunk of) non-free Javascript run by the websites I visit, and some firmware, my computing world runs entirely on FOSS.
For absolutely everyone in every situation? Surely not. That's OK.
Really, the only point that matters a lot here is the first one.
> Does it promote "choosing the right tool for the job", or does it promote blind idealism ("free is better")?
It seems to me to also promote the fact that FOSS is far more compatible with academic culture and behavior. While indeed you may have to pay publishers for access to articles (luckily a practice that's on decline!), you certainly have complete freedoms to build on the work presented in those articles for your own research!
I'd go so far as to say that no closed tool can ever be "right for the job" in an academic research setting! (Although one sometimes does have to compromise when no adequate alternatives exist, especially when it comes to lab equipment – but in the CS world things are a lot better.)
> And why does a university, which takes exorbitant tuition fees, not prioritize the best software for the course (over the one that's merely free)?
I don't understand what MIT's tuition fees have to do with this.
But for there to be any form of income trickling down production chains, someone has to be willing to pay something for the services they consume. Is this controversial in any way?
No, but it is also entirely orthogonal to the blog entry we're discussing. At no point does the monetary cost of something enter into what Sussman is talking about. You seem to be conflating free-as-in-beer with free-as-in-freedom (man, I feel nostalgic writing those phrases again – I don't mean this as an offense, but the difference seems to be so much more well understood among the tech savvy these days than it was 15 years ago).
This is where the coffee analogy becomes relevant. While indeed the cost of coffee affects a lot of things in the coffee value chain, the idea of fair trade (for all its flaws, let's not digress into those here) are not about the end product's cost.
None. But I really don't get your point.
Sussman taught the first edX course, 6.002x. Agarwal took credit for it (since he shot the videos and was the face), but Sussman did the plurality of the work, followed by Terman, by Mitros, and then by Agarwal.
Open edX is free-as-in-beer but not free-as-in-price.
And in most cases, it does not. Why are we teaching people to reach out for the suboptimal tools in these situations?
Non-commercial software does not have this in that sense. It may have advocates who, out of sheer enthousiasm, bring software into such universities, companies and governments, but hardly ever an actual sales.
And since non-commercial software is largely FLOSS, whereas commercial software if most often proprietary, we see that, simply through sales, the proprietary alternatives are used far more often.
Regardless of any technical merits. Technical superiority hardly "sells" software, sales teams do that. Unfortunately, I might add.
I wish I had had that opportunity when I studied computer science, because my tools were treated as a sort of "magical black box" with no visibility.
The programs we wrote in class were toy programs, and there was no sort of "reality check" for how our editor or compiler or any other tool was actually written.
> 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.
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?
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.
Architects have copyright to their work. They do sell the same plans over and over. No one can just copy their work without paying royalties or at least getting permission.
Or, in other words - the default state of things is that copyright does not exist, not that it does. It's on copyright proponents to prove that we have a better world with it than without.
Great software developers already largely make their fortune doing bespoke work for clients with a need for it. So do great lawyers, great doctors, great system administrators, great technical writers, and so on. This isn't a new idea.
Or even better, grab some other people with knowledge of the domain and go find capital so you can do what the other businesses are doing, but better, because you're backed by deep knowledge of the software that runs your company and the other companies have no clue and no money.
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.
You're assuming a generalization which is not present in the article. People can disagree on the merits of paid software and still agree that teaching using open solutions is has benefits. One does not necessarily follow the other.
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.
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
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.
The delta between Jitsi Meet and Zoom or Teams for video-conferencing is minimal from a user experience perspective. The idea that a CS graduate from MIT would struggle to figure out Zoom or Teams at their first job is laughable.
What is worse, is that if this was the case, the University failed spectacularly in their goal. I would mean they trained a monkey to do one trick.
I sincerely hope a university like MIT is better than simply training monkeys some tricks which they then repeat ad-infinitum at "their jobs".
Seriously? In 2020, the idea of writing software using free tools is "radical"?
> without knowing how enterprise commercial software work
What software specifically? I mean, you want to write web clients? Almost entirely free tools. Android or ChromeOS drivers? Ditto. Backend cluster deployment paradigms? Free. Docker? Free. Kube? Free.
I mean, it's not like you can't find some worthwhile "enterprise commercial software" out there to buy. But to pretend that the bulk of the most exciting work in software isn't almost entirely done with open source tooling (and has been for more than a decade!) is... just very strange.
Please no. It is already difficult to find unis whose undergraduate degrees are not filled with things like java and enterprise-grade programming.
Regardless, universities are not for teaching you to use specific products. This is what manuals are for.
Vocational schools exist if you want to be spoonfed how to do something cut-and-dry.
My university had a College of Nursing - again, job training for nurses.
Oh, and a College of Education which includes training teachers.
Don't be a snob. A 4-year college is only one of many good ways to get an education and an explicit career-path isn't just a "cut-and-dry" education.
Sorry my overly idealistic friend, but as long as every job posting "prefers" (i.e. requires) a BS CS, it's fine to see the pursuit of that BS as a means to an end.
Academia trains people for academia, which is an end in itself. Industry happens to like the skillset that people with that training have. This motivates people who do not wish for an academic career to undergo academic training.
Win-win. It doesn't mean that said academic training has to adapt to the whims of industry, or turn into trade school.
Is there maybe room for a less academic higher education system next to the more academic one? Sure. But getting industry to accept that (as in e.g. Germany or Switzerland) is not academia's concern.
And the teachers and professors know that.
Here's one CS department which explicitly states how they can help students improve their career changes in the professional world, quoting https://cse.unl.edu/focus-areas :
> The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln introduces Focus Areas for its Computer Science and Computer Engineering majors. The goal of the Department is to equip our graduates with advanced skills focused in specific areas to better position them for successful careers. In today’s professional world, computing and computational problem solving skills are ubiquitously in demand in a host of advanced technology and scientific applications.
And they are far from unique. Here's an English department, quoting https://www.saddleback.edu/la/english-department :
> Of course, the first thing people imagine when they think of getting an English degree is teaching high school. Teaching is certainly a noble profession, but there are many career paths one can pursue with an English degree outside of teaching due to the excellent training provided in this field.
Emphasis mine in both quotes.
If it were, then whoever published your CS textbooks would own all the software you’ve ever written. That is clearly not he case.
Yeah, the author of the comment you're replying to is either a troll or has no idea how copyright works.