[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.

[bergstromm466]

> 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_...

[gspr]

The article you point to illustrates that that basic attitude and culture is under threat. I agree. Openness, being able to build on the works of others, and learning "how something ticks on the inside" are still basic to science though.

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.