[md5person]

This isn't an accurate analogy, is it?

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)?

[fsflover]

>whilst simultaneously portraying it as somehow morally superior

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"?

[berkes]

You seem to fail to grasp the difference between "free as in beer" (gratis) and "free as in freedom" (libre).

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.

[md5person]

> "You seem to fail to grasp the difference between "free as in beer" (gratis) and "free as in freedom" (libre)."

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.

[berkes]

I gave you an example by quoting how expensive it is to run a "free" jitsi service.

[md5person]

> "I gave you an example by quoting how expensive it is to run a "free" jitsi service."

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...

[Kim_Bruning]

"It made available licenses for various nonfree programs, but I objected to them on grounds of principle.".

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!)

[gspr]

> (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.

[gspr]

> promotes drinking "free coffee", whilst simultaneously portraying it as somehow morally superior to "coffee one has to pay for" to consume.

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.

[md5person]

> "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."

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?

[gspr]

> 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.