[TuringTest]

>It's kind of hard to follow the moral stance here.

Fighting for civil rights often makes you look like a prick, because you keep laser-focused on your goal and need to counter all the reasonable-sounding objections of people who were following their daily routines before this ball-breaker came along; but it is nevertheless necessary.

Contrary to Hollywood films, people don't stamp on other people's rights because they have some inner impulse to do evil, but because injustices are ingrained in the common way to do things, and fixing then implies to deviate from those routines; that's why it's so hard to change them.

That's the real meaning of the sentence "for evil to triumph, all it takes is for good people to do nothing". The movie script of a hero taken the matter in their hands and saving the world with heavy guns is but a fantasy

[throwaway2056]

> Fighting for civil rights often makes you look like a prick, because you keep laser-focused on your goal and need to counter all the reasonable-sounding objections of people who were following their daily routines before this ball-breaker came along; but it is nevertheless necessary.

you are correct. All true.

But there are no easy to implement groupware, open office, email, chat suite. Yes, in hn you can say zoho or sogo or libreoffice. While I totally use OSS, it is a pain for Universities to find talent to implement this at scale.

Also a majority just use MS products and want compatibility. This is similar to tons of devs doing OSS dev but using MacOS (and using VM or remote ssh) as they want their devices to run for 12 hours on battery.

Some European universities tried going open solutions - this patchwork either failed or some even got hacked.

At the end, there are no easy solutions. I sincerely wished some one like Linux foundation implements a total OSS solution based on nextcloud to build all integrated suite to compete with G-suite or MS.

[counttheforks]

The problem is being required to install Microsoft spyware on your personal devices

[daviddever23box]

...to access non-free software or services. That is patently ridiculous and philosophically inconsistent.

[daviddever23box]

This seems somewhat overblown, inasmuch as the use of proprietary, closed-source productivity applications developed in the United States is itself an a priori compromise of eFSF values.

Email is a thankless, dirty business (ask anyone that has ever done an Exchange migration), and there is no incentive for the University to necessarily use and maintain a persistent free software-based email backend. It would be a better outcome to allow students the ability to use their own, personally-chosen communication services and devices, with the caveat that this might exclude some students or faculty from accessing resources that are under the control of commercial partnerships.

Stop putting your hand in the meat grinder and turning the crank. It IS possible to live the FOSS dream; just stop whining that non-FOSS software and services have left you behind-it's not their directive to do so.