[indigochill]

>Don’t we buy oscilloscopes, lathe machines, incubators, scientific glass, etc for our student labs?

Of course, because there's a material cost for manufacturing physical things. The marginal cost of "manufacturing" copies of digital information after the information is created the first time is the price of the electrons it takes to perform that copy, so very close to zero.

I think everyone agrees there's a real weight of responsibility on teachers. Some feel that getting students onboard with FOSS is the responsible choice.

[systemvoltage]

Yea physical goods was a bad analogy, I’ve redacted it.

[woofie11]

No. It was an excellent analogy.

Free software is like physical goods with Right to Repair. In the olden days, if you bought a radio, it came with a service manual and a schematic.

It's how many people learned EE, and it was a huge loss when that went away. People maintained their own stuff. People tinkered. That's how Sussman learned to EE too.

That's an analogy to free software exactly, 100%, and spot-on.

[systemvoltage]

Good points. One major problem is I can make 10,000 copies of the software in a minute.

The hardware developer still gets to feed their children with an income.

[woofie11]

Turns out I've fed my family just fine working on free software for most of my life (sometimes as a software engineer, but more often as a researcher, entrepreneur, executive, and otherwise). Probably 75% of my jobs.

Even in an extreme hypothetical -- if the government were to mandate that all software be free software -- only a minority of software developers would lose their jobs. Banks still need to manage transactions. Employers still need to manage payroll. Google still needs to serve up ads and search results. And I don't want to host AWS myself. Those organizations will continue to pay to build software.

There's a huge bit of confusion that the word 'free' somehow means you don't get paid. It doesn't. It turns out if the source code pops up on github under a GPL license, most of the time, the world just keeps on ticking.

There are exceptions, of course -- companies like Adobe would likely disappear -- but for 90+% of jobs in software, whether it's free software or proprietary impacts your ability to make money not-at-all.

The most successful organization I helped found was almost exclusively free software. There were hundreds of people using our platform as open source, and zero of them competed with us head-on. The only differences were: (1) our customers trusted us a lot more (if we went away, they wouldn't be SOL) (2) we had a massive amount of engineering work done on someone else's dime.

In more senior roles, or even being more assertive in most junior roles, I could usually release what I was working on as free software by asking. Right now, of the programming work I do, about 90% is free software. The organization I work at is probably 95% proprietary software. The value of keeping me around + good PR + possible contributions + ... is much higher than the value of having exclusive rights to source code that I write.

[systemvoltage]

I partially agree with your points. I've worked in deeply esoteric fields - layout editors for semiconductors to wind-turbine simulation packages. There is a whole world of software out there besides the tools most software engineers use - things like PostgreSQL and your favorite web framework.

A turbine simulation package costs $250k a year in license and it is specifically tailored for our wind turbine nacelle loads, configuration and wind farm layout.

If they just give out this software for free but provide support, I am not sure if that would be sustainable. They can provide the source code for inspection ("visible code" not "open source code") if that's what your concern is. Most esoteric software don't care about the visibility of their code. It is just the right to use it freely that they opposite and I feel like rightfully so.