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This isn't an accurate analogy, is it? We're discussing an educational institution with power and authority (MIT), which promotes drinking "free coffee", whils

This isn't an accurate analogy, is it? We're discussing an educational institution with power and authority (MIT), which promotes drinking "free coffee", whilst simultaneously portraying it as somehow morally superior to "coffee one has to pay for" to consume. Growing and selling coffee takes time, labour and effort - yet none of that is being reflected or accounted for when we choose to not pay for the coffee we consume. Is this a sustainable approach? Does it promote "choosing the right tool for the job", or does it promote blind idealism ("free is better")? And why does a university, which takes exorbitant tuition fees, not prioritize the best software for the course (over the one that's merely free)?

fsflover 6y ago
>whilst simultaneously portraying it as somehow morally superior Free software is morally superior, see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor.... It provides specific rights to the user so that the user is in control of their computing and not the developers. > Is this a sustainable approach? Does it promote "choosing the right tool for the job", or does it promote blind idealism ("free is better")? How to decide what is "blind idealism" and what is "normal idealism"?
berkes 6y ago
You seem to fail to grasp the difference between "free as in beer" (gratis) and "free as in freedom" (libre). Your coffee-response is all wrong: this is not about "free" coffee, about (not) having to pay for coffee, but about a moral stance on coffee: e.g. demanding the cafetaria only serves Fair Trade coffee, regardless of the price. This is not about "having to pay for it" at all. The opposite really: running your own jitsi or BigBlueButton is probably more expensive than using the free tier of Teams, Zoom or Hangouts. I run a large-ish jitsi instance: approx €50/month just for the VPS, my hours probably add another €2000/month to that.
- md5person 6y ago
  > "You seem to fail to grasp the difference between "free as in beer" (gratis) and "free as in freedom" (libre)." Why are we going back-and-forth about this again? I previously asked whether there were concrete examples of software used during the course that were "free as in freedom" but NOT "free as in beer", and the response to my question was that no such examples were available. It's the actions that matter here, and the bottom line is that they weren't intending to pay for anything to begin with. And by that, they were abdicating the "it's not about the money" argument, in my honest opinion.
  - berkes 6y ago
    I gave you an example by quoting how expensive it is to run a "free" jitsi service.
    - md5person 6y ago
      > "I gave you an example by quoting how expensive it is to run a "free" jitsi service." That's an entirely meaningless argument. Here's what you're doing: > "I run a large-ish jitsi instance: approx €50/month just for the VPS, my hours probably add another €2000/month to that." Here's what Sussman is doing: > "I used a Jitsi Meet server that I installed on an obsolete and otherwise useless computer that was sitting idle in my laboratory, on its way to the electronics junk heap." The two scenarios are not comparable. I'm not making exaggerated claims here. The University can absolutely afford to do better, the students (who pay exorbitant tuition fees) deserve better, and any "libre software" idealism here is simply people trying to cut costs, jeopardizing the quality of education and the overall experience, while touting moralistic superiority... Distance learning, for example, could've been a much more widespread and accepted thing, had it not been for instructors cobbling up together scrapyard-bound hardware to use as a chat server. Coming up with a proper solution takes investing (time, money, expertise) - which some people will evidently avoid at all costs...
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - 6y ago
gspr 6y ago
> promotes drinking "free coffee", whilst simultaneously portraying it as somehow morally superior to "coffee one has to pay for" to consume. The price does not enter into Sussman's argument. Maybe it could, given how students tend to be short on money and abhor paying for expensive textbooks, but it doesn't. > Growing and selling coffee takes time, labour and effort - yet none of that is being reflected or accounted for when we choose to not pay for the coffee we consume. In my coffee analogy, the promotion of the fair-trade alternative would be based on the fair-trade mechanism for ensuring the lower levels of the production chain receive a fairer share of the income. Whether or not the author pays less or more at the store is irrelevant to the argument. > Is this a sustainable approach? For this class? Almost surely! For some people (e.g. me)? To a large extent (things aren't black and white). Apart from (the admittedly large chunk of) non-free Javascript run by the websites I visit, and some firmware, my computing world runs entirely on FOSS. For absolutely everyone in every situation? Surely not. That's OK. Really, the only point that matters a lot here is the first one. > Does it promote "choosing the right tool for the job", or does it promote blind idealism ("free is better")? It seems to me to also promote the fact that FOSS is far more compatible with academic culture and behavior. While indeed you may have to pay publishers for access to articles (luckily a practice that's on decline!), you certainly have complete freedoms to build on the work presented in those articles for your own research! I'd go so far as to say that no closed tool can ever be "right for the job" in an academic research setting! (Although one sometimes does have to compromise when no adequate alternatives exist, especially when it comes to lab equipment – but in the CS world things are a lot better.) > And why does a university, which takes exorbitant tuition fees, not prioritize the best software for the course (over the one that's merely free)? I don't understand what MIT's tuition fees have to do with this.
- md5person 6y ago
  > "In my coffee analogy, the promotion of the fair-trade alternative would be based on the fair-trade mechanism for ensuring the lower levels of the production chain receive a fairer share of the income. Whether or not the author pays less or more at the store is irrelevant to the argument." But for there to be any form of income trickling down production chains, someone has to be willing to pay something for the services they consume. Is this controversial in any way?

fsflover 6y ago

>whilst simultaneously portraying it as somehow morally superior Free software is morally superior, see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor.... It provides specific rights to the user so that the user is in control of their computing and not the developers. > Is this a sustainable approach? Does it promote "choosing the right tool for the job", or does it promote blind idealism ("free is better")? How to decide what is "blind idealism" and what is "normal idealism"?

berkes 6y ago

You seem to fail to grasp the difference between "free as in beer" (gratis) and "free as in freedom" (libre). Your coffee-response is all wrong: this is not about "free" coffee, about (not) having to pay for coffee, but about a moral stance on coffee: e.g. demanding the cafetaria only serves Fair Trade coffee, regardless of the price. This is not about "having to pay for it" at all. The opposite really: running your own jitsi or BigBlueButton is probably more expensive than using the free tier of Teams, Zoom or Hangouts. I run a large-ish jitsi instance: approx €50/month just for the VPS, my hours probably add another €2000/month to that.

md5person 6y ago
> "You seem to fail to grasp the difference between "free as in beer" (gratis) and "free as in freedom" (libre)." Why are we going back-and-forth about this again? I previously asked whether there were concrete examples of software used during the course that were "free as in freedom" but NOT "free as in beer", and the response to my question was that no such examples were available. It's the actions that matter here, and the bottom line is that they weren't intending to pay for anything to begin with. And by that, they were abdicating the "it's not about the money" argument, in my honest opinion.
- berkes 6y ago
  I gave you an example by quoting how expensive it is to run a "free" jitsi service.
  - md5person 6y ago
    > "I gave you an example by quoting how expensive it is to run a "free" jitsi service." That's an entirely meaningless argument. Here's what you're doing: > "I run a large-ish jitsi instance: approx €50/month just for the VPS, my hours probably add another €2000/month to that." Here's what Sussman is doing: > "I used a Jitsi Meet server that I installed on an obsolete and otherwise useless computer that was sitting idle in my laboratory, on its way to the electronics junk heap." The two scenarios are not comparable. I'm not making exaggerated claims here. The University can absolutely afford to do better, the students (who pay exorbitant tuition fees) deserve better, and any "libre software" idealism here is simply people trying to cut costs, jeopardizing the quality of education and the overall experience, while touting moralistic superiority... Distance learning, for example, could've been a much more widespread and accepted thing, had it not been for instructors cobbling up together scrapyard-bound hardware to use as a chat server. Coming up with a proper solution takes investing (time, money, expertise) - which some people will evidently avoid at all costs...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - 6y ago

gspr 6y ago

> promotes drinking "free coffee", whilst simultaneously portraying it as somehow morally superior to "coffee one has to pay for" to consume. The price does not enter into Sussman's argument. Maybe it could, given how students tend to be short on money and abhor paying for expensive textbooks, but it doesn't. > Growing and selling coffee takes time, labour and effort - yet none of that is being reflected or accounted for when we choose to not pay for the coffee we consume. In my coffee analogy, the promotion of the fair-trade alternative would be based on the fair-trade mechanism for ensuring the lower levels of the production chain receive a fairer share of the income. Whether or not the author pays less or more at the store is irrelevant to the argument. > Is this a sustainable approach? For this class? Almost surely! For some people (e.g. me)? To a large extent (things aren't black and white). Apart from (the admittedly large chunk of) non-free Javascript run by the websites I visit, and some firmware, my computing world runs entirely on FOSS. For absolutely everyone in every situation? Surely not. That's OK. Really, the only point that matters a lot here is the first one. > Does it promote "choosing the right tool for the job", or does it promote blind idealism ("free is better")? It seems to me to also promote the fact that FOSS is far more compatible with academic culture and behavior. While indeed you may have to pay publishers for access to articles (luckily a practice that's on decline!), you certainly have complete freedoms to build on the work presented in those articles for your own research! I'd go so far as to say that no closed tool can ever be "right for the job" in an academic research setting! (Although one sometimes does have to compromise when no adequate alternatives exist, especially when it comes to lab equipment – but in the CS world things are a lot better.) > And why does a university, which takes exorbitant tuition fees, not prioritize the best software for the course (over the one that's merely free)? I don't understand what MIT's tuition fees have to do with this.

md5person 6y ago
> "In my coffee analogy, the promotion of the fair-trade alternative would be based on the fair-trade mechanism for ensuring the lower levels of the production chain receive a fairer share of the income. Whether or not the author pays less or more at the store is irrelevant to the argument." But for there to be any form of income trickling down production chains, someone has to be willing to pay something for the services they consume. Is this controversial in any way?