[Sugar-devel] GPL non compliance? [Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 30, Issue 66]

[Walter Bender]

Please excuse the top posting, but I want to comment in general rather
than try to address individual statements you made.

I gave a talk at Libreplanet last year that addressed many of the
issues you raise regarding the appropriateness of using Free Software
in education. (It is online somewhere... the link escapes me at the
moment.) In my personal opinion, the goal, beyond providing great
tools to as many children as possible, is to acculturate them with the
principles of Free Software; especially, in keeping with the belief
that learning is not something done to you, but something do,
conveying the message that the tools you use are not black boxes, but
things you can shape yourself. That is not to say that I expect
children to be submitting patches (although a few have), but being
immersed in the freedoms associated with Free Software is part of the
process of achieving technological fluency. We have yet to prove that
this fluency spills over into other aspects of life, but that is my
working hypothesis.

That said, there are very few examples of Free Software that are
really end-user modifiable in any practical sense except by expert end
users. I made the point at Libreplanet that we need to go beyond
providing theoretical freedoms to providing code that really can be
expected to be modified by the end user. (This is not easy to do -- it
has been one of the issues I have been struggling with personally with
the Sugar Activities I have been maintaining, e.g., Turtle Art, where
I have tried to provide a plurality of ways into the code.)

Can it be done safely? I implore you to reread the Bitfrost document,
which describes how we intended to provide the children with a safe
place to exercise their freedoms. Although not fully implemented, the
goal remains to have a sufficiently robust environment that children
and teachers can experiment and make mistakes without harming
themselves, their computer, or others. I think this is an achievable
goal and one that is still worthwhile pursuing. Sascha's work on
versioning is part of the solution. My recent reiteration of the goal
to make Sugar be *easily* locally (in $HOME) modifiable
(copy-on-write) is another example.

Another, mundane, reason for GPL is to enable local and regional
modifications to Sugar. I don't believe we can support Sugar globally
without enabling that support to be distributed locally. But also,
putting responsibility into the hands of local and regional
organizations goes part and parcel with the acculturation I spoke of
earlier. Unless you feel some ownership, why bother? So we want people
to have the opportunity to invest themselves in the project.

I am not qualified to answer your legal questions regarding the
application of software licenses to minors and I expect the answer
varies from place to place.

I am also hesitant to reopen the root access question, but I think
that OLPC took great care in designing safeguard to system regardless
of whether or not the user has access to root and given that the
combination of Sugar and Fedora has such a small footprint, the
overhead associated with reflashing a damaged system -- the worst-case
scenario -- is not so onerous. In practice, I am unaware of any
serious issues with root access in any OLPC deployment, but I may be
ignorant of some pandemic of problems such as you describe.

FWIW, as I understand it, the reasons for denying root access in
Uruguay had nothing to do with a concern for the operating system. It
was simply a convenient way for Ceibal to preserve a secret on each
machine that was used for their national WiFi service, which they want
to provide freely to children, but only to children.

This is not about politics. It is not about laptops. It is an education project.

regards.

-walter


On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 9:56 AM, Yioryos Asprobounitis
<mavrothal at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- On Tue, 4/26/11, sugar-devel-request at lists.sugarlabs.org <sugar-
>>    3. Re: [SLOBS]  GPL non compliance?
>
> First let me apologizes for my previous “loaded” post. Well... it was loaded.
> Hopefully this one is not.
>
> So I was wondering  to what extend GPLvX applies to Sugar’s target users.
> The *educationa*l goals of use, study, share and modify can be certainly fulfilled in the context of one or more activities.
> But why is it a goal _one_ 8 year-old to be able to modify Sugar even if this means that 100.000 8year-olds will constantly break Sugar because of that?
>
> Clearly there is no precedence of that scale and I doubt that when drafting a software license the “generic”  8-12year-old was even considered. Not that special 8-12year-old that went looking and landed in the computer/linux world, but the one that was “dropped” in it.
> Is there any indication that actually GPLvX considered use by 8-12 year-olds or even that is consciously age-agnostic?
> Do the license legal points apply/have authority over  10-year-olds?
> Does anyone knows if they where ever tested in a court and found valid for kids?
>
> But beyond legal terms, is it wise to give unlimited access  to the software and hardware because using Sugar under GPLvX requires it/is a principle /is a political statement?
> How many would trust their computer with root access to a 10 yead-old that never met before?
> And if you do, would you do the same to the current 2 and hopefully future 20 million, Sugar users?
> Specially with passwordless root access and selinux/bitfrost not fully implemented, inactivated or inactivat-able
> What about if a malicious adult takes a hold of the machine directly or remotely?
> Who would be responsible for any harm by/towards the kids/a third party? The 12-year-olds? The granting agency? SL? FSF?
>
> There are probably mechanisms around these issues, but should an elaborate repair, security, safety, monitoring and probably policing system be setup because Sugar’s license/principle/political statement, demands 8-12 year-olds be treated as informed adults?
>
> *Should   8-12 year-olds be treated as informed adults?*
>
> If they are, or even capable of, what about labor, military, guns, crime, pornography or even just sharp objects and camping out alone?
> (I do not think that the argument “if you can modify the code you are responsible enough” is valid. Any 10-year-old can type 3 or 30 commands that a hacker posted in a newsgroup and another kid said that “is cool”)
>
> Sugar is *not* just as any other Linux software out there.
> Is an educational platform aimed at (early) pre-adolescent and adolescent pupils  in the context of an educational system.
> Terms and conditions appropriate for this audience should guide its licensing principles and not the other way around.
>
> I’m not advocating locked systems in general. What I’m saying is that the decision to fully unlock a system should not be a prerequisite to implement Sugar’s license.
> If SL believes that fulfilling a GPLvX license is a major issue for 8-12year-old users, then Sugar should  be implemented in a way that its license can be easily and fully fulfilled by the non-privileged user.
>
> In general though I would think that if Linux is to take a hold in early education, should draft a license appropriate for this age group  (for example stamp it PG-13 ;) or “tolerate” the violation.  It is not coincidental that so far, I believe, all sugar deployments violate all GPL licensing and do not allow their end users to modify the bulk of the code in the machines (let’s wait and see when, to what extend and how, promises for the opposite will materialize)
>
>
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>



-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org