[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.