[fsloth]

Don't take this so much as about ideology, than as a mode of pedagogical thought. Free software is decomposable to first principles, and it makes perfect sense to use it in a CS class.

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.

[fsckboy]

if one were teaching medicine in a third world context, free software would offer many benefits to their clinical practice of medicine.

[matheusmoreira]

I'm from a developing country and the quality of commercial EMR systems varies from acceptable to abysmal. They usually have very poor usability and security. I once used a system which backed up the database by making a copy of the MySQL directory on the same machine. This other system would fetch all patient data from web APIs without using HTTPS despite the existence of GDPR-like legislation.

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.

[fsloth]

Do you have concrete examples of this?

[fsckboy]

you changed the verb tense; if you matched mine you would ask "would you have examples".

but to answer your question, yes, every time LibreOffice, Firefox, or Apache is used in a third world medical context.