[Its.an.education.project] Freedom is a good deal (Was: Ivan's latest blog entry on OLPC)

[Sameer Verma]

Bernie Innocenti wrote:
> Martin Langhoff wrote:
>
>> No quite :-) but, I've been through the "early linux"->"linux power
>> user"->"pissed off by linux, got a powerbook"->"pissed off by OSX,
>> back to linux" cycle.
>
> Ah, me too!  My "OSX period" lasted almost 2 years, and yours?
>

I've stepped up to that bar (pun intended) a few times, but I am so
addicted to AbsolutFOSS that I step away :-) Incidentally, there is an
Apple Store right next to our campus. We also have a very good EDU
reseller program for Apple in our bookstore, but I honestly haven't seen
the value proposition to be significantly better than what I have right
now.

A big plus for me is that suspend and hibernate now work on my laptop
with Hardy (8.04). One less reason to reconsider OSX.

I am a professor of Information Systems (MIS) in the College of
Business, so I have to have a copy of XP and MS Office handy for all
those moments when someone sends me an overly complicated Word document
or a MS Access MDB file. Its the platform of choice in most business
environments. For that, I have Windows XP and MS Office (employer
licensed) running in a VM. Keeping XP + MS Office in a sandbox has
really worked out for me.
> I also had a 4-5 years Windows development period.  A prerequisite for me
> to become profoundly disgusted by the whole proprietary software
> ecosystem.
>

This is usually the case of many who stumble upon FOSS. In a previous
life I worked on many a Windows system (starting with Asymetrix Toolbook
1.53 on Windows 3.1) and in those years, I worked for two startups that
went belly up because their apps broke without warning and the customers
took us to the cleaners. Why did the apps break? Unannounced break in
MS-API that broke all the HTTP stuff back in the days of IE 4. How do we
fix it? Wait for the patch. When do we get it? Can't say. Can we fix it
ourselves? No. That's it! Close your shop and go home.

Years of development on closed platforms, followed by discovery of Linux
in the mid-nineties led me to a slow but steady changeover to the other
side. Interestingly, I would get frustrated with the proprietary stuff
at work, but would find way better FOSS solutions through my friends at
school!

Working through a business degree immersed me into a total Windows
environment. Nobody wanted to touch any of that free "hippie" stuff. We
ran expensive NT stuff for years at my school. We even had "student
ambassadors" from Microsoft (we still do) who run advocacy events for
MSFT. In fact, when I started working at SF State and introduced PHP and
MySQL back in 2001, there was a very strong opposition for bringing that
stuff into our labs. The only reason they let me run it in my office was
because all I wanted was a 133 MHz Pentium with 48MB RAM :-) Now, we run
Moodle with 30,000+ students across our entire campus :-)

Things are changing. Students in my classes read about the free stuff
and ask about it. Some have already started using Ubuntu etc. as their
primary OS and revel in the joy of Synaptic. Some use OOo, GIMP,
Inkscape, Audacity, etc. to get their assignments done. It takes time,
but eventually, they get it - you know, the free "hippie" stuff.

> It seems to me that new users who have grown in this golden era cannot
> truly appreciate the amount of freedom they enjoy these days, after 10
> years
> of steady growth of FOSS have increasingly forced proprietary vendors
> away
> from their worst practices.
> Who remembers daisy chaining 3 hardware dongles to my parallel port just
> to use the software they needed at work?  And juggling a dozen different
> CDs just to install everything they required to use a new computer?
> Each time a machine would reboot, you'd get plenty of annoying splash
> screens of which you couldn't get rid.  Not to mention searching for
> cracks on astalavista so you could use a text editor and a zip
> archiver :-)
>

It is really painful to go back to XP every now and then. I'm glad I
moved away. Agreed that its a seven year old platform, but still, it
lacks a lot of things that I have gotten used to, so XP is no fun. BTW,
I also run Win 3.1 in a VM for kicks and that's always fun to look at :-)

> Believe it or not, this is how computers really looked like in the '90s,
> when Microsoft was still dominating the (computing) world.
>
> Now OSX is 80% open source, and Microsoft is forced to give away server
> applications unencumbered with per-seat licenses.  Would this have
> happened also without GNU, Linux, Apache, Samba...?  I doubt it.
>
> Most users, especially the non technical ones, feel more comfortable
> using
> a convenient mixture of free and proprietary software that solves their
> immediate computing needs.  Fine, but they should be aware how much they
> are actually benefiting from the efforts of thousands who stand still and
> work on providing alternative solutions.
>
> If Rob Savoye and his friends were content with using Adobe's Flash, now
> we'd not have Gnash which works pretty decently, is portable to different
> CPUs, and can start the movies paused by default (a nice anti-ad
> feature).
> Check it out and help the Gnash hackers by reporting bugs or sending your
> patches.
>
> Freedom is not a theoretical issue.  It has very important practical
> consequences too, but these are sometimes harder to see, even when they
> are right in front of your nose.
>
> Yes, freedom may not be for free... but it's usually a good investment.
>
>

As we move over from analog to digital, software has the potential to
control access to information and information (or rather access to it)
controls  companies, industries, education, and even governments.  It is
this reason why I strongly feel that software needs to be unencumbered.
Large software companies want to control software for the same reason.
Software should be an agnostic medium that does not influence the
message. Net Neutrality has the same argument. It should be like Fox
news - We report, you decide (kidding!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel

cheers,
Sameer

-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/