28 ms·

Teaching my MIT classes with only free/libre software

455 points by gnu 6y ago

andi999 6y ago
I am a fan of open software, and also a realist. I think what he did is great. My only concern is that the source code in the book is gpl licensed (and not MIT or better public domain). This means for the student taking the class he technically is not allowed to use anything later in his work life (except of course he works for an open source company, which only a few do, bigger exception if the company uses the software only inhouse - but then he is in the EE department, so this means most students might work on products later).
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  Most coursework is (implicitly) proprietary, and that's not a problem, so I wouldn't expect an issue there. I suspect the key issue here is that the students are unlikely to be copying the material at a level which would qualify as a derivative work.
- garmaine 6y ago
  That is not how copyright works. If it were, then whoever published your CS textbooks would own all the software you’ve ever written. That is clearly not he case.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  Once Richard Stallman gave me a GPLv3 sticker. I have been contaminated and I can only write GPLv3 since.
  - gspr 6y ago
    Think of all the cells you have grown since then. Consider this a formal written request for your DNA :-) Yeah, the author of the comment you're replying to is either a troll or has no idea how copyright works.
gcatalfamo 6y ago
While commendable, I don’t think this approach is useful. I also had a professor that only wanted to use FOSS for its students but the reality is that university should prepare - at least to a certain degree - for work. The radicalization of this approach leads to students that land their first job without knowing how enterprise commercial software work lacking therefore a very useful entry level skill.
- m0zg 6y ago
  I must be doing something wrong, because all of my work over the past decade was done using mostly (like 95%) free software. And as a hiring manager I cared not at all if my hires know about "enterprise commercial software". In fact, I'd also add that the time I spent learning commercial dev tools (Microsoft stack) turned out to be absolutely useless in the long term. Worse than useless, in fact, because I could have spent that time learning tools and libraries on which some commercial company doesn't pull the rug from underneath me every 2-3 years, like Microsoft has a habit to do, to force upgrades.
- whymauri 6y ago
  FWIW, most people that take classes with Sussman are self-selected to be people who care about FOSS.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  I do not think the job of universities is to teach how to use any specific piece of software - be it enterprise, commercial, proprietary, free or not. That software changes and often different between companies, so what should be learned is knowledge that applies regardless of software. And TBH i do not see why a university should provide free (or worse, paid[0]) advertisement material for a commercial product. [0] i mean paid by the software companies and it is worse because usually the students either paid for the admission to the university, meaning they paid to get advertised to, or they enrolled in a public university, meaning the taxpayers paid money to have their children advertised to
  - wiz21c 6y ago
xrisk 6y ago
The instructor is also one of the authors of SICP.
- barking 6y ago
  Nice to see that he is still teaching, having seen his videos from 1986 when he as already a professor I presume.
noobermin 6y ago
It honestly would be great for some competition, FOSS or not in the distance learning department. Blackboard and friends are horrendous, and as we know zoom has myriad problems. For a small group meeting I have each week that is now online, I've started using jitsi too.
- synergetic 6y ago
  Agreed. Moodle (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle) is a solid FOSS alternative to BB and is widely used among UK universities.
- enjoyyourlife 6y ago
  Canvas (https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms) is open-source
  - remexre 6y ago
    This actually surprises me, with how cruddy it is, I assumed it was proprietary... My uni switched to canvas from Moodle, to the general detriment of anyone without fast internet and a fast PC.
    - servilio 6y ago
      Do you know if they are using the a hosted version or hosting it themselves?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I brought this up once and a couple of university employees were quick to mention that features that actually let them use it at scale cost a bunch of money and there were fairly large support costs even for open source solutions.
- bransonf 6y ago
  Blackboard has some really shady IP practices as well. In 2006 they got a patent essentially for LMS (learning management systems) in general and immediately sued a competitor. Not only that, I’ve discovered some minor exploits in my time using it. For what it is, it’s horrible software and none of my professors were ever happy to use it.
raister 6y ago
I will probably get downvoted a lot, and this is more or less pertinent to this, so here's a rant: I am quite sick to make software work these days: someone coded something using Python3.6 and numpy1.18.5 then three years pass. Now, it's Python3.8.9 and the software is incompatible with it, so now I have to download Python3.6.5 (not Python 3.6.1) e try to make things work. But then TLS/SSL was discontinued and I'm getting weird messages. Download the source files, ./configure, make, make install multiple times adding different parameters, add new repositories to apt, try to download the right packages, end up installing the latest Python3.8.9, and other things I don't want. And the software still not works. Oh boy. Something is got to change in making software.
- TheDong 6y ago
  Have I got some nixpkgs to sell you then :) Really though, with the nix package manager (https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/), if anyone at any point in time had a working nix package for a given program, and as long as all the inputs (source code) are still either online or cached somewhere with the same sha256, it's possible to get the exact same output. This works with very few exceptions. Some things, like systemd dbus calls, runtime calls to an internet api that might have changed, other runtime impure things, will of course be exceptions. But in general, there aren't other exceptions. It doesn't matter if your computer has python3.9 installed, nix doesn't mind using python3.6.5 for one old package. So yeah, nix solves exactly the problem you're complaining about. I agree something's broken in other distros, but nix fixes it. Note, others will say containers solve this, and that's also sorta true. If someone had a docker image laying around with exactly that version of software installed and working, and you can still download said image, you'll get a working setup that way. But actually rebuilding the container (unless it's built with nix) is unlikely to be as nicely reproducible, and it misses some nice properties as a result. Also, I can see why you might get downvoted since this isn't really that relevant to the post. It's not just free software that suffers from the problem of shipping and packaging software being a space full of unreproducibility and incompatibility
  - diffeomorphism 6y ago
    That doesn't fix anything but just pushes the problem further down the road. You are simply not upgrading the python version and running the identical three year old version.
md5person 6y ago
What's wrong with having to pay for software? Or learning to accept that some software is proprietary? Or even with learning to use the right tool for the job, even if that "right tool" may sometimes come at a cost? Students are required to pay for their education at MIT. Were the costs of this course offset with the costs of the non-free software used in an otherwise "standard course"? People put immense effort into developing software. Is asking for compensation for one's time and effort somehow wrong? And in many cases, proprietary/commercial software really does outperform the equivalent FOSS/Libre solution. Why are we teaching people to reach out for the suboptimal tools in these situations?
- chottocharaii 6y ago
  No one objects to people being paid to make software. What if people were paid through public grants, or paid well through the welfare state; instead of through the legal scarcity provided by intellectual property?
  - aww_dang 6y ago
    Or even voluntary contributions of time or money? Typically those who utilize open software for commercial ends contribute code. Opensource contributors are hired by companies using their software.
- logane 6y ago
  Sussman means free as in freedom, not free as in beer :) (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software)
  - md5person 6y ago
    > "Sussman means free as in freedom, not free as in beer :) (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software)" Sure, but conveniently enough, the software listed in the parent article [0] all happens to be "free as in beer". What examples of "free as in freedom, but we had to pay for it before we could use it" software was used during the course? [0] https://www.gnu.org/education/teaching-my-mit-classes-with-only-free-libre-software.html https://www.gnu.org/education/teaching-my-mit-classes-with-o...
p4bl0 6y ago
That is nice and all but I fail to see how it is particular: the situation described here is also what me and most of my colleagues did during this period (except we used instances of these software hosted by our own university). I believe it is the same in most universities.
- kkylin 6y ago
  I think most universities (MIT included, and certainly mine) went directly to Zoom or something like it. GJS wanted to show you can do this with FOSS.
  - kleiba 6y ago
    In my university, it's Microsoft all the way.
zelphirkalt 6y ago
Obviously he is a great (one of the best?) teachers. Having the lecture use free software only, shows he also cares about ethics at his work. I think that makes him a better teacher. Far too few people in CS care about the ethics side as well.
- marta_morena_24 6y ago
  Yeah right, because MIT is such a cheap school, it totally is required to use free software, because that is going to make a difference. Instead, MIT should make sure that students get their software and materials free of charge, not that the material or software itself is free (just because students on scholarships or alike may not have the money). They should use what is best for the students and not what is best to support some ideology.
  - Phlogi 6y ago
    It's not about the price, it's about the freedom I assume. Having free of charge proprietary software for students is a different approach. I wouldn't call it unethical though.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Conan_Kudo 6y ago
      Why wouldn't you? Using software that restricts your freedom to use, modify, and share in the pursuit of advancing the human understanding of the universe around us seems to be short-sighted. Free Software gives everyone the equal opportunity to leverage the same tools and practices to do research, development, and further our understanding of our world. In most cases, proprietary software does not.
      - rimliu 6y ago
        Wow. Please, explain, how writing a book in Libre Office instead of say, Pages, changes some physicists ability to research, development and furthering our understanding of our world. And no, free software does not give anything to everyone. A very small percentage of the world population could make use of the benifits it being open cource, and even smaller ever will.
tester34 6y ago
"Here" prof decided to use free Libre software probably due to $$$$ Students were mad because they thought that Office/Excel are way better and easier, so...
pfortuny 6y ago
Great that his institution lets him run servers for his classrooms from “any” place. At my school, first thing: disconnect all your servers except for required lavoratory things. ...
- nekopa 6y ago
  Gotta keep the toilet server up and running...
- renewiltord 6y ago
  I think it is no sheer coincidence that the following three things are simultaneously true: A. MIT is as renowned as it is B. MIT does this C. MIT has people like Gerald Sussman as Professors
  - woofie11 6y ago
    ... and MIT became famous for work during the AI Lab days. ... MIT is going down the tubes. ... And people like Jerry (correctly) say MIT would never hire someone like them today.
    - raxxorrax 6y ago
      I think he is right and that it is a sad development. We see similar things in the industry, perhaps even more pronounced.
    - Nebasuke 6y ago
      Would you mind giving some context/source for the third remark? I tried to search for the statement that MIT would not hire someone like Jerry, but I could not find it myself.
      - woofie11 6y ago
        It turns out Google isn't as good as talking to people. If you'd like a confirmation, e-mail a one-line question to him: "Hi. I'm interested in how elite schools hire people. Would MIT hire someone like you (as you were when you were hired) today?" (1) Please don't reference this conversation. (2) Please keep it short. Jerry's super-approachable, but MIT professors get a ton of cold-calls. 40 words tops. (3) If you are MIT-affiliated, mention that. You'll be more likely to get a response. Or if you'd like more background, call him on the phone (yes, those exist) and see if he has time for a chat. He'll always find time to talk to MIT students (current and former), but for others, it depends on how busy he is. Life skill: Cold-call interesting people. You can learn a lot that way.
rgrau 6y ago
A bit tangential to the main topic, but I can't wait for that book to be out. IIRC (I read it somewhere??) it's based on his 'Robust Systems' thoughts and experiments. Total mystery here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-flexibility https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-flexibility You can dip your toe here: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/ https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/
mellosouls 6y ago
It made available licenses for various nonfree programs, but I objected to them on grounds of principle. I hope he also objected to taking payment for his own services on grounds of principle, lest people think of him as rather sanctimonious.
- ranaexmachina 6y ago
  Not getting payed is not the point of free software.
- neilv 6y ago
  That criticism sounded a bit harsh and hasty. Sussman has done a lot of good, and one instance you might've heard of the ground breaking of giving away a top textbook, SICP, on the early Web.
neilv 6y ago
For a professor to use only FLOSS when teaching CS students about software engineering seems entirely appropriate to me, and a good on-principle exercise. Consider the goals of universal accessibility of education, reproducible systems research that can be built upon, allowing students to explore and improve systems, techie obligations to promote privacy and security in information systems, and simply setting an example to software engineering students that this is doable. Also, MIT is one of the original homes of various FLOSS ideas, and if they can't manage to use FLOSS, who can? So maybe there's additional sense of professional obligation. And after he did it, it was written up, to encourage others to try it.
- phkahler 6y ago
  My approach in all area - work include - is to use FLOSS by default unless I can't for some reason. Usability is one reason, and as a developer it's good to observe the flaws that drive me to commercial software at times. Why would anyone not choose FLOSS by default?
  - rimliu 6y ago
    The answer to your question is in your comment. When you consistently have to pick commercial software over floss because of the usability, it makes sense to skip that step and go to the commercial software right away.
    - fsflover 6y ago
      The problem with your reasoning is that often free software is better in usability.
      - ryanianian 6y ago
        Familiarity and momentum makes even convoluted and unusable software feel more usable (pointing finger at MSOffice).
        6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fsloth 6y ago
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 6y ago
  if one were teaching medicine in a third world context, free software would offer many benefits to their clinical practice of medicine.
  - fsloth 6y ago
    Do you have concrete examples of this?
    - fsckboy 6y ago
      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.
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    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.
cellularmitosis 6y ago
> The class used a draft textbook that Chris Hanson and I have written. The book is entitled “Software Design for Flexibility (how to avoid programming yourself into a corner)”; it will be published by MIT Press soon, with a Creative Commons Share Alike license (and all the code in support of the book is under the GNU GPL) Looking forward to this!!!
systemvoltage 6y ago
What’s wrong with paying for a product or a service if it’s better for my students? Isn’t the teacher’s job to find the best available tools for their students and not engage in some kind of open source software usage high score? Edit: People are getting downvoted left and right. Why is this such a polarizing topic?
- indigochill 6y ago
  >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 6y ago
    Yea physical goods was a bad analogy, I’ve redacted it.
    - woofie11 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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.
craigsmansion 6y ago
I think one of the nicer points to take away here is that prof. Sussman worked around remote teaching problems not by getting bogged down in meetings, but by calling a friendly admin and by himself installing a piece of free software on a computer he had lying around in his lab. Free Software gives you back the agency to solve your problems in any way you see fit(be they hacks or not). It doesn't leave you helpless and dependent on the goodwill of third parties.
- Craighead 6y ago
  Unless you don't know how to fix something and the only people that do are goodwilling 3rd parties
- nanna 6y ago
  So long as there isn't a bureaucracy in place to get in the way. That's a limit of Free Software.
  - kick 6y ago
    That's a limit of bureaucracy, not of free software.
    - Shared404 6y ago
      Unfortunately, still an effective limit of FL/OSS software. Not the software's fault, but still still a limit.
eddieoz 6y ago
I used BigBlueButton between 2010-2013 for remote training classes on OZ Technology. The infrastructure was built over AWS, automatically stopping the servers after all people leaving the channels. For starting it, it was monitoring the training schedule and 'opening/loading' the channel a few moments before the class start. Cheap, open-source and reliable.
- chiefsucker 6y ago
  AWS doesn’t necessary sound like OSS, but to each his own ;) It’s definitely great that such an architecture worked for you and also shows how hard it can be to run a full OSS stack these days.
nanna 6y ago
I teach at a world ranking university in the UK which has decided that in order to have a 'standardised student experience' teachers are prohibited from running their own FLOSS setup when there are proprietary contracts in place. Sorry but MS Teams is not designed with teaching in mind. I've been advocating for Big Blue Button and Jitsi but effectively told to shut up. It's infuriating.
- vhakulinen 6y ago
  You could try to calculate some numbers on savings or "wasted hours because the corporate support is slow and wont fix our problems fast enough" to turn their heads around. Another pointer could be that the students could be involved in running some of the systems. Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot.
  - nanna 6y ago
    The problem is that Microsoft are good at selling a product which just works out of the box and is just about sufficient, even if it's not tailored to your use-case. Plus there's so little transparency as to how much they're charging my university, or how many hours wasted there are, so it's hard to make a price-comparison. Student participation in some of the projects could work for certain modules, but only as experiments -- again we've been specifically prohibited from spinning up our own solutions. > Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot. I agree that ultimately what needs to happen is that those of us who care about FLOSS need to organise and try to chip away at the corporate one-size-fits-all dependency syndrome at the university. The kinds of data ownership debates happening in Germany seem very far off here. The British university is in retreat. [1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/10/uk-universities-suffer-worst-ever-rankings-in-world-league-table https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/10/uk-univers...
  - brodouevencode 6y ago
    > You could try to calculate some numbers on savings or "wasted hours because the corporate support is slow and wont fix our problems fast enough" to turn their heads around. If the UK universities are anything like the US universities this is near impossible to do. Maybe COVID has changed some things but when I worked in the university system (state run) it was more about who could woo what administrator. The amount of waste and nepotism would make your head spin.
spicyramen 6y ago
Thanks to open source projects students are able to learn, experiment and grow. I was lucky enough to have one of our professors introduced me to Asterisk for VoIP calls. Being able to learn and modify the code base and contribute back to the community are skills which helped me grow as a professional
agalunar 6y ago
I'd also recommend Libre Tools for Teaching https://hz.mit.edu/thoughts/teaching_with_libre_software.html https://hz.mit.edu/thoughts/teaching_with_libre_software.htm... which discusses the tools that were used to run one of MIT's introductory programming course online (due to coronavirus).
ffdixon1 6y ago
I am the product manager for BigBlueButton. While we implement most of the capabilities you would expect in a web conferencing system, we focus on giving the instructor many ways to engage students for learning. Being open source has enabled many schools around the world to setup and run their own BigBlueButton servers. Thanks to our community, we're localized in over 25 languages, provide a pure HTML5 interface, and have been deeply integrated into many of the most popular learning management systems. Our road map will continue of focus on the teacher/student engagement. Needless to say, Covid-19 made a lot people take a closer look at BigBlueButton. We've been working on it for 10+ years now, and we're very determined to make it the most effective platform for virtual classrooms and build upon our community.
- frabbit 6y ago
  How can someone _subscribe_ to a hosted (by you or someone else) instance for a smallish (~20 participants max) class?
- gnu 6y ago
  Thanks so much for giving us BigBlueButton. Some of the folks in the Debian community have been trying to package it up in Debian and found it a bit challenging that some of the dependencies of BBB work only with specific Ubuntu versions. Would you please help address that and help them move forward with packaging it up and include it in Debian? Thanks again.
  - ffdixon1 6y ago
    We're in the process of moving away from an internal build system for the packaging to having the debian package scripts as part of the repo. This work is underway for BigBlueButton 2.3 (the next version) and beyond. Once we get them released, it's going to be a lot easier for others to build and contribute to the packaging.
    - gnu 6y ago
      Awesome! Thanks.
philzook 6y ago
"The class used a draft textbook that Chris Hanson and I have written. The book is entitled “Software Design for Flexibility (how to avoid programming yourself into a corner)”; it will be published by MIT Press soon, with a Creative Commons Share Alike license (and all the code in support of the book is under the GNU GPL)." I'm very excited for this. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-flexibility https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-flexibility For reference, Sussman is an author of Scheme and - SICP https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/book/book.html https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/... - Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/structure-and-interpretation-classical-mechanics-second-edition https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/structure-and-interpretation-... - Functional Differential Geometry - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-differential-geometry https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-differential-geome... All of which are available free online (look for the open access tab)
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Is there free software alternative to zoom?

455 points by gnu 6y ago

I am a fan of open software, and also a realist. I think what he did is great. My only concern is that the source code in the book is gpl licensed (and not MIT or better public domain). This means for the student taking the class he technically is not allowed to use anything later in his work life (except of course he works for an open source company, which only a few do, bigger exception if the company uses the software only inhouse - but then he is in the EE department, so this means most students might work on products later).

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
Most coursework is (implicitly) proprietary, and that's not a problem, so I wouldn't expect an issue there. I suspect the key issue here is that the students are unlikely to be copying the material at a level which would qualify as a derivative work.
garmaine 6y ago
That is not how copyright works. If it were, then whoever published your CS textbooks would own all the software you’ve ever written. That is clearly not he case.
speedgoose 6y ago
Once Richard Stallman gave me a GPLv3 sticker. I have been contaminated and I can only write GPLv3 since.
- gspr 6y ago
  Think of all the cells you have grown since then. Consider this a formal written request for your DNA :-) Yeah, the author of the comment you're replying to is either a troll or has no idea how copyright works.

gcatalfamo 6y ago

While commendable, I don’t think this approach is useful. I also had a professor that only wanted to use FOSS for its students but the reality is that university should prepare - at least to a certain degree - for work. The radicalization of this approach leads to students that land their first job without knowing how enterprise commercial software work lacking therefore a very useful entry level skill.

m0zg 6y ago
I must be doing something wrong, because all of my work over the past decade was done using mostly (like 95%) free software. And as a hiring manager I cared not at all if my hires know about "enterprise commercial software". In fact, I'd also add that the time I spent learning commercial dev tools (Microsoft stack) turned out to be absolutely useless in the long term. Worse than useless, in fact, because I could have spent that time learning tools and libraries on which some commercial company doesn't pull the rug from underneath me every 2-3 years, like Microsoft has a habit to do, to force upgrades.
whymauri 6y ago
FWIW, most people that take classes with Sussman are self-selected to be people who care about FOSS.
badsectoracula 6y ago
I do not think the job of universities is to teach how to use any specific piece of software - be it enterprise, commercial, proprietary, free or not. That software changes and often different between companies, so what should be learned is knowledge that applies regardless of software. And TBH i do not see why a university should provide free (or worse, paid[0]) advertisement material for a commercial product. [0] i mean paid by the software companies and it is worse because usually the students either paid for the admission to the university, meaning they paid to get advertised to, or they enrolled in a public university, meaning the taxpayers paid money to have their children advertised to
- wiz21c 6y ago

xrisk 6y ago

The instructor is also one of the authors of SICP.

barking 6y ago
Nice to see that he is still teaching, having seen his videos from 1986 when he as already a professor I presume.

noobermin 6y ago

It honestly would be great for some competition, FOSS or not in the distance learning department. Blackboard and friends are horrendous, and as we know zoom has myriad problems. For a small group meeting I have each week that is now online, I've started using jitsi too.

synergetic 6y ago
Agreed. Moodle (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle) is a solid FOSS alternative to BB and is widely used among UK universities.
enjoyyourlife 6y ago
Canvas (https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms) is open-source
- remexre 6y ago
  This actually surprises me, with how cruddy it is, I assumed it was proprietary... My uni switched to canvas from Moodle, to the general detriment of anyone without fast internet and a fast PC.
  - servilio 6y ago
    Do you know if they are using the a hosted version or hosting it themselves?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I brought this up once and a couple of university employees were quick to mention that features that actually let them use it at scale cost a bunch of money and there were fairly large support costs even for open source solutions.
bransonf 6y ago
Blackboard has some really shady IP practices as well. In 2006 they got a patent essentially for LMS (learning management systems) in general and immediately sued a competitor. Not only that, I’ve discovered some minor exploits in my time using it. For what it is, it’s horrible software and none of my professors were ever happy to use it.

raister 6y ago

I will probably get downvoted a lot, and this is more or less pertinent to this, so here's a rant: I am quite sick to make software work these days: someone coded something using Python3.6 and numpy1.18.5 then three years pass. Now, it's Python3.8.9 and the software is incompatible with it, so now I have to download Python3.6.5 (not Python 3.6.1) e try to make things work. But then TLS/SSL was discontinued and I'm getting weird messages. Download the source files, ./configure, make, make install multiple times adding different parameters, add new repositories to apt, try to download the right packages, end up installing the latest Python3.8.9, and other things I don't want. And the software still not works. Oh boy. Something is got to change in making software.

TheDong 6y ago
Have I got some nixpkgs to sell you then :) Really though, with the nix package manager (https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/), if anyone at any point in time had a working nix package for a given program, and as long as all the inputs (source code) are still either online or cached somewhere with the same sha256, it's possible to get the exact same output. This works with very few exceptions. Some things, like systemd dbus calls, runtime calls to an internet api that might have changed, other runtime impure things, will of course be exceptions. But in general, there aren't other exceptions. It doesn't matter if your computer has python3.9 installed, nix doesn't mind using python3.6.5 for one old package. So yeah, nix solves exactly the problem you're complaining about. I agree something's broken in other distros, but nix fixes it. Note, others will say containers solve this, and that's also sorta true. If someone had a docker image laying around with exactly that version of software installed and working, and you can still download said image, you'll get a working setup that way. But actually rebuilding the container (unless it's built with nix) is unlikely to be as nicely reproducible, and it misses some nice properties as a result. Also, I can see why you might get downvoted since this isn't really that relevant to the post. It's not just free software that suffers from the problem of shipping and packaging software being a space full of unreproducibility and incompatibility
- diffeomorphism 6y ago
  That doesn't fix anything but just pushes the problem further down the road. You are simply not upgrading the python version and running the identical three year old version.

md5person 6y ago

What's wrong with having to pay for software? Or learning to accept that some software is proprietary? Or even with learning to use the right tool for the job, even if that "right tool" may sometimes come at a cost? Students are required to pay for their education at MIT. Were the costs of this course offset with the costs of the non-free software used in an otherwise "standard course"? People put immense effort into developing software. Is asking for compensation for one's time and effort somehow wrong? And in many cases, proprietary/commercial software really does outperform the equivalent FOSS/Libre solution. Why are we teaching people to reach out for the suboptimal tools in these situations?

chottocharaii 6y ago
No one objects to people being paid to make software. What if people were paid through public grants, or paid well through the welfare state; instead of through the legal scarcity provided by intellectual property?
- aww_dang 6y ago
  Or even voluntary contributions of time or money? Typically those who utilize open software for commercial ends contribute code. Opensource contributors are hired by companies using their software.
logane 6y ago
Sussman means free as in freedom, not free as in beer :) (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software)
- md5person 6y ago
  > "Sussman means free as in freedom, not free as in beer :) (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software)" Sure, but conveniently enough, the software listed in the parent article [0] all happens to be "free as in beer". What examples of "free as in freedom, but we had to pay for it before we could use it" software was used during the course? [0] https://www.gnu.org/education/teaching-my-mit-classes-with-only-free-libre-software.html https://www.gnu.org/education/teaching-my-mit-classes-with-o...

p4bl0 6y ago

That is nice and all but I fail to see how it is particular: the situation described here is also what me and most of my colleagues did during this period (except we used instances of these software hosted by our own university). I believe it is the same in most universities.

kkylin 6y ago
I think most universities (MIT included, and certainly mine) went directly to Zoom or something like it. GJS wanted to show you can do this with FOSS.
- kleiba 6y ago
  In my university, it's Microsoft all the way.

zelphirkalt 6y ago

Obviously he is a great (one of the best?) teachers. Having the lecture use free software only, shows he also cares about ethics at his work. I think that makes him a better teacher. Far too few people in CS care about the ethics side as well.

marta_morena_24 6y ago
Yeah right, because MIT is such a cheap school, it totally is required to use free software, because that is going to make a difference. Instead, MIT should make sure that students get their software and materials free of charge, not that the material or software itself is free (just because students on scholarships or alike may not have the money). They should use what is best for the students and not what is best to support some ideology.
- Phlogi 6y ago
  It's not about the price, it's about the freedom I assume. Having free of charge proprietary software for students is a different approach. I wouldn't call it unethical though.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Conan_Kudo 6y ago
    Why wouldn't you? Using software that restricts your freedom to use, modify, and share in the pursuit of advancing the human understanding of the universe around us seems to be short-sighted. Free Software gives everyone the equal opportunity to leverage the same tools and practices to do research, development, and further our understanding of our world. In most cases, proprietary software does not.
    - rimliu 6y ago
      Wow. Please, explain, how writing a book in Libre Office instead of say, Pages, changes some physicists ability to research, development and furthering our understanding of our world. And no, free software does not give anything to everyone. A very small percentage of the world population could make use of the benifits it being open cource, and even smaller ever will.

tester34 6y ago

"Here" prof decided to use free Libre software probably due to $$$$ Students were mad because they thought that Office/Excel are way better and easier, so...

pfortuny 6y ago

Great that his institution lets him run servers for his classrooms from “any” place. At my school, first thing: disconnect all your servers except for required lavoratory things. ...

nekopa 6y ago
Gotta keep the toilet server up and running...
renewiltord 6y ago
I think it is no sheer coincidence that the following three things are simultaneously true: A. MIT is as renowned as it is B. MIT does this C. MIT has people like Gerald Sussman as Professors
- woofie11 6y ago
  ... and MIT became famous for work during the AI Lab days. ... MIT is going down the tubes. ... And people like Jerry (correctly) say MIT would never hire someone like them today.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    I think he is right and that it is a sad development. We see similar things in the industry, perhaps even more pronounced.
  - Nebasuke 6y ago
    Would you mind giving some context/source for the third remark? I tried to search for the statement that MIT would not hire someone like Jerry, but I could not find it myself.
    - woofie11 6y ago
      It turns out Google isn't as good as talking to people. If you'd like a confirmation, e-mail a one-line question to him: "Hi. I'm interested in how elite schools hire people. Would MIT hire someone like you (as you were when you were hired) today?" (1) Please don't reference this conversation. (2) Please keep it short. Jerry's super-approachable, but MIT professors get a ton of cold-calls. 40 words tops. (3) If you are MIT-affiliated, mention that. You'll be more likely to get a response. Or if you'd like more background, call him on the phone (yes, those exist) and see if he has time for a chat. He'll always find time to talk to MIT students (current and former), but for others, it depends on how busy he is. Life skill: Cold-call interesting people. You can learn a lot that way.

rgrau 6y ago

A bit tangential to the main topic, but I can't wait for that book to be out. IIRC (I read it somewhere??) it's based on his 'Robust Systems' thoughts and experiments. Total mystery here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-flexibility https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-flexibility You can dip your toe here: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/ https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6.945/readings/

mellosouls 6y ago

It made available licenses for various nonfree programs, but I objected to them on grounds of principle. I hope he also objected to taking payment for his own services on grounds of principle, lest people think of him as rather sanctimonious.

ranaexmachina 6y ago
Not getting payed is not the point of free software.
neilv 6y ago
That criticism sounded a bit harsh and hasty. Sussman has done a lot of good, and one instance you might've heard of the ground breaking of giving away a top textbook, SICP, on the early Web.

neilv 6y ago

For a professor to use only FLOSS when teaching CS students about software engineering seems entirely appropriate to me, and a good on-principle exercise. Consider the goals of universal accessibility of education, reproducible systems research that can be built upon, allowing students to explore and improve systems, techie obligations to promote privacy and security in information systems, and simply setting an example to software engineering students that this is doable. Also, MIT is one of the original homes of various FLOSS ideas, and if they can't manage to use FLOSS, who can? So maybe there's additional sense of professional obligation. And after he did it, it was written up, to encourage others to try it.

phkahler 6y ago
My approach in all area - work include - is to use FLOSS by default unless I can't for some reason. Usability is one reason, and as a developer it's good to observe the flaws that drive me to commercial software at times. Why would anyone not choose FLOSS by default?
- rimliu 6y ago
  The answer to your question is in your comment. When you consistently have to pick commercial software over floss because of the usability, it makes sense to skip that step and go to the commercial software right away.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    The problem with your reasoning is that often free software is better in usability.
    - ryanianian 6y ago
      Familiarity and momentum makes even convoluted and unusable software feel more usable (pointing finger at MSOffice).
      - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

fsloth 6y ago

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 6y ago
if one were teaching medicine in a third world context, free software would offer many benefits to their clinical practice of medicine.
- fsloth 6y ago
  Do you have concrete examples of this?
  - fsckboy 6y ago
    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.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  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.

cellularmitosis 6y ago

> The class used a draft textbook that Chris Hanson and I have written. The book is entitled “Software Design for Flexibility (how to avoid programming yourself into a corner)”; it will be published by MIT Press soon, with a Creative Commons Share Alike license (and all the code in support of the book is under the GNU GPL) Looking forward to this!!!

systemvoltage 6y ago

What’s wrong with paying for a product or a service if it’s better for my students? Isn’t the teacher’s job to find the best available tools for their students and not engage in some kind of open source software usage high score? Edit: People are getting downvoted left and right. Why is this such a polarizing topic?

indigochill 6y ago
>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 6y ago
  Yea physical goods was a bad analogy, I’ve redacted it.
  - woofie11 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.

craigsmansion 6y ago

I think one of the nicer points to take away here is that prof. Sussman worked around remote teaching problems not by getting bogged down in meetings, but by calling a friendly admin and by himself installing a piece of free software on a computer he had lying around in his lab. Free Software gives you back the agency to solve your problems in any way you see fit(be they hacks or not). It doesn't leave you helpless and dependent on the goodwill of third parties.

Craighead 6y ago
Unless you don't know how to fix something and the only people that do are goodwilling 3rd parties
nanna 6y ago
So long as there isn't a bureaucracy in place to get in the way. That's a limit of Free Software.
- kick 6y ago
  That's a limit of bureaucracy, not of free software.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    Unfortunately, still an effective limit of FL/OSS software. Not the software's fault, but still still a limit.

eddieoz 6y ago

I used BigBlueButton between 2010-2013 for remote training classes on OZ Technology. The infrastructure was built over AWS, automatically stopping the servers after all people leaving the channels. For starting it, it was monitoring the training schedule and 'opening/loading' the channel a few moments before the class start. Cheap, open-source and reliable.

chiefsucker 6y ago
AWS doesn’t necessary sound like OSS, but to each his own ;) It’s definitely great that such an architecture worked for you and also shows how hard it can be to run a full OSS stack these days.

nanna 6y ago

I teach at a world ranking university in the UK which has decided that in order to have a 'standardised student experience' teachers are prohibited from running their own FLOSS setup when there are proprietary contracts in place. Sorry but MS Teams is not designed with teaching in mind. I've been advocating for Big Blue Button and Jitsi but effectively told to shut up. It's infuriating.

vhakulinen 6y ago
You could try to calculate some numbers on savings or "wasted hours because the corporate support is slow and wont fix our problems fast enough" to turn their heads around. Another pointer could be that the students could be involved in running some of the systems. Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot.
- nanna 6y ago
  The problem is that Microsoft are good at selling a product which just works out of the box and is just about sufficient, even if it's not tailored to your use-case. Plus there's so little transparency as to how much they're charging my university, or how many hours wasted there are, so it's hard to make a price-comparison. Student participation in some of the projects could work for certain modules, but only as experiments -- again we've been specifically prohibited from spinning up our own solutions. > Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot. I agree that ultimately what needs to happen is that those of us who care about FLOSS need to organise and try to chip away at the corporate one-size-fits-all dependency syndrome at the university. The kinds of data ownership debates happening in Germany seem very far off here. The British university is in retreat. [1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/10/uk-universities-suffer-worst-ever-rankings-in-world-league-table https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/10/uk-univers...
- brodouevencode 6y ago
  > You could try to calculate some numbers on savings or "wasted hours because the corporate support is slow and wont fix our problems fast enough" to turn their heads around. If the UK universities are anything like the US universities this is near impossible to do. Maybe COVID has changed some things but when I worked in the university system (state run) it was more about who could woo what administrator. The amount of waste and nepotism would make your head spin.

spicyramen 6y ago

Thanks to open source projects students are able to learn, experiment and grow. I was lucky enough to have one of our professors introduced me to Asterisk for VoIP calls. Being able to learn and modify the code base and contribute back to the community are skills which helped me grow as a professional

agalunar 6y ago

I'd also recommend Libre Tools for Teaching https://hz.mit.edu/thoughts/teaching_with_libre_software.html https://hz.mit.edu/thoughts/teaching_with_libre_software.htm... which discusses the tools that were used to run one of MIT's introductory programming course online (due to coronavirus).

ffdixon1 6y ago

I am the product manager for BigBlueButton. While we implement most of the capabilities you would expect in a web conferencing system, we focus on giving the instructor many ways to engage students for learning. Being open source has enabled many schools around the world to setup and run their own BigBlueButton servers. Thanks to our community, we're localized in over 25 languages, provide a pure HTML5 interface, and have been deeply integrated into many of the most popular learning management systems. Our road map will continue of focus on the teacher/student engagement. Needless to say, Covid-19 made a lot people take a closer look at BigBlueButton. We've been working on it for 10+ years now, and we're very determined to make it the most effective platform for virtual classrooms and build upon our community.

frabbit 6y ago
How can someone _subscribe_ to a hosted (by you or someone else) instance for a smallish (~20 participants max) class?
gnu 6y ago
Thanks so much for giving us BigBlueButton. Some of the folks in the Debian community have been trying to package it up in Debian and found it a bit challenging that some of the dependencies of BBB work only with specific Ubuntu versions. Would you please help address that and help them move forward with packaging it up and include it in Debian? Thanks again.
- ffdixon1 6y ago
  We're in the process of moving away from an internal build system for the packaging to having the debian package scripts as part of the repo. This work is underway for BigBlueButton 2.3 (the next version) and beyond. Once we get them released, it's going to be a lot easier for others to build and contribute to the packaging.
  - gnu 6y ago
    Awesome! Thanks.

philzook 6y ago

"The class used a draft textbook that Chris Hanson and I have written. The book is entitled “Software Design for Flexibility (how to avoid programming yourself into a corner)”; it will be published by MIT Press soon, with a Creative Commons Share Alike license (and all the code in support of the book is under the GNU GPL)." I'm very excited for this. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-flexibility https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-design-flexibility For reference, Sussman is an author of Scheme and - SICP https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/book/book.html https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/... - Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/structure-and-interpretation-classical-mechanics-second-edition https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/structure-and-interpretation-... - Functional Differential Geometry - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-differential-geometry https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-differential-geome... All of which are available free online (look for the open access tab)

ngcc_hk 6y ago

Is there free software alternative to zoom?