4 ms·

If it isn't, it should be. School is obligatory, we really shouldn't employ commercial products in schools to begin with. In Portugal, some years ago, kids were

If it isn't, it should be. School is obligatory, we really shouldn't employ commercial products in schools to begin with. In Portugal, some years ago, kids were given computers with a Linux distro pre-installed for *free*, and LibreOffice was used as a word processor replacement. Argentina did the same thing, hell there were others too.

ymolodtsov 4y ago
So kids now have to learn bad products like LibreOffice they will use in their life? Fantastic.
- spookie 4y ago
  What's so bad about LibreOffice? If they want they want, they can use another word processor out of their own volition, the problem here is Word being the default.
msh 4y ago
So no books then? Most of them are published commercially.
- rekrsiv 4y ago
  Physical volumes are still easier to secure than computer systems. They might trust the physical copies more.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Textbooks should really be public domain. They're paid for by public money anyway, it's just we currently also pay 10x the cost to make them directly to elsevier or pearson.
  - EUROCARE 4y ago
    What do you mean, they're paid for by public money? I don't think that's true at all - at least in EU. Some of them get public donations (to support the independence of the authors, usually), and some of them are written by people paid by a university, but there's so much more completely independently funded textbooks...
    - spookie 4y ago
      I'm also European, from Portugal specifically. Our taxes pay for mandatory schools textbooks, just like in the US it seems.
      - EUROCARE 4y ago
        I don't think this is the correct view of the system. Individual schools in Portugal (as well as where I live, and in the US) are buying books on the market, and the books are competing on it - just writing a textbook doesn't guarantee any school will buy it, it's a risk - and that's great because it means the writers have to make good books and there's a lot of choice and many different styles and price levels. That's very different from "textbooks paid for by public money" as if the state funded its creation and thus owned the copyright while de-risking it for the authors - meaning paid their salary. EU occasionally provides funding to authors and they're explicit about the writers owning their copyright, because the point is to support their independence. So suggesting moving a work into public domain just because a public school bought it is... weird. Why books and not other education equipment, e.g. chemistry/physics/electronics sets? What about educational software? Imagine a school bought a book you wrote about programming/whatever you do (the school where I went did that a lot with many different books from small-time authors that were used as textbooks during lessons), should it suddenly become public domain just because some of the money someone spent on it came from taxes? I think that's very broken. Public schools aren't the only ones buying textbooks anyways. There's a very healthy market of private schools, and I know of textbooks catered specifically to them, some of them even funded by them, that are then also bought by public schools. There's also homeschooling, alternative non-public non-profit schools, etc. Sometimes people buy textbooks by themselves, e.g. adults who want to (re-)learn, parents who think the books provided by school are inadequate, children who destroyed the copy they received at school... That textbooks are "paid for by public money" is reductio ad absurdum. The system is much more complex. However, I think that the state/EU (or US) should also fund textbooks and put them into the public domain, as long as using them isn't mandatory - that's a great idea and it never hurts to have one more option.
        spookie 4y ago
- DoughnutHole 4y ago
  "Use nothing commercial ever" is probably too extreme. I'd agree with the parent that schools shouldn't be getting kids to use things like GSuite, but not solely because it's commercial - the problem is the data management practices of these companies, which the state should not be supporting by forcing children to use these services to complete their education and inevitably giving companies like Google huge amounts of personal data. This isn't a problem with textbooks, commercial or otherwise.
EUROCARE 4y ago
That's cool, but you can't give out mailboxes for free like you can give away computers. It needs to run somewhere, the servers maintained by someone. Do you have a better solution than Gmail? I know only about Microsoft, is that even an improvement?
- lrvick 4y ago
  I host email for hundreds of people with a $10/mo VPS. Schools classically self hosted their network services and they can do so again. It is a good opportunity to mentor future sysadmins too.
  - EUROCARE 4y ago
    It's great that you do, but that's not a typical school admin skillset. People who know this have zero reason to slave for a school. > Schools classically self hosted their network services Back when encryption wasn't even needed, hackers were a curiosity and deliverability wasn't a concern. This is never coming back. School is a very important part of people's lives (parents, children, teachers, other staff), deliverability and security must be perfect. Schools also manage loads of very private data. As a parent, I don't want the school admin to touch it with a 10-meter pole, I want them to use a managed service that they can't screw up even if they tried very hard (and sometimes school admins look at data themselves - the less opportunity they have the better). > It is a good opportunity to mentor future sysadmins too. The point is to have working email that everyone can rely on, not to groom kids/teachers to become sysadmins. It's better for everyone if the school admin focuses on solving things no one else can solve (e.g. handing out the free computers and installing Linux on them) rather than wasting time tinkering with email hosting for public money.
- 0xedd 4y ago
  You can Google free email services rather than use bing. Protonmail is one. Free version includes much more than what a student needs. Students can sign up themselves.
  - EUROCARE 4y ago
koheripbal 4y ago
You think the government builds desks, blackboards, buildings, directly. Everything is outsourced to private companies. That's how economics works.
- flatline 4y ago
  Private companies can develop software with government data rights. Hosting isn’t free but they pay for an n-year contract with support and can find another vendor for the software and hosting in n years if they want. That’s a good collaboration between govt and industry, governments should insist on stuff like this so they retain ownership over what they paid for, as much as possible.
- throwaway290 4y ago
  Except the pesky difference that in other cases the school/gov purchases a product for students while in this case it pays nothing and supplies students as the product.
- lrvick 4y ago
  Those things are also not proprietary to any one company. Outsourcing labor to make generic things we could obtain elsewhere is not the same thing as teaching tools only one company controls. We should not use schools to further the vendor-lock-in of corporations.
- gpm 4y ago
  Using those things doesn't require that the students enter into a contract with the contractor, doesn't seem comparable.
exo762 4y ago
> School is obligatory, we really shouldn't employ commercial products in schools to begin with. I think a better formulation of this would be following. School is obligatory, we should not employ products that collect private information of students.
- spookie 4y ago
  Well, yeah I didn't mean to sound so extreme. I was just implying that a product intended for public use shouldn't mean "commercial", in the sense of an end consumer product. Your customer isn't the end consumer. The same applies to profucts sold to other companies.

ymolodtsov 4y ago

So kids now have to learn bad products like LibreOffice they will use in their life? Fantastic.

spookie 4y ago
What's so bad about LibreOffice? If they want they want, they can use another word processor out of their own volition, the problem here is Word being the default.

msh 4y ago

So no books then? Most of them are published commercially.

rekrsiv 4y ago
Physical volumes are still easier to secure than computer systems. They might trust the physical copies more.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Textbooks should really be public domain. They're paid for by public money anyway, it's just we currently also pay 10x the cost to make them directly to elsevier or pearson.
- EUROCARE 4y ago
  What do you mean, they're paid for by public money? I don't think that's true at all - at least in EU. Some of them get public donations (to support the independence of the authors, usually), and some of them are written by people paid by a university, but there's so much more completely independently funded textbooks...
  - spookie 4y ago
    I'm also European, from Portugal specifically. Our taxes pay for mandatory schools textbooks, just like in the US it seems.
    - EUROCARE 4y ago
      I don't think this is the correct view of the system. Individual schools in Portugal (as well as where I live, and in the US) are buying books on the market, and the books are competing on it - just writing a textbook doesn't guarantee any school will buy it, it's a risk - and that's great because it means the writers have to make good books and there's a lot of choice and many different styles and price levels. That's very different from "textbooks paid for by public money" as if the state funded its creation and thus owned the copyright while de-risking it for the authors - meaning paid their salary. EU occasionally provides funding to authors and they're explicit about the writers owning their copyright, because the point is to support their independence. So suggesting moving a work into public domain just because a public school bought it is... weird. Why books and not other education equipment, e.g. chemistry/physics/electronics sets? What about educational software? Imagine a school bought a book you wrote about programming/whatever you do (the school where I went did that a lot with many different books from small-time authors that were used as textbooks during lessons), should it suddenly become public domain just because some of the money someone spent on it came from taxes? I think that's very broken. Public schools aren't the only ones buying textbooks anyways. There's a very healthy market of private schools, and I know of textbooks catered specifically to them, some of them even funded by them, that are then also bought by public schools. There's also homeschooling, alternative non-public non-profit schools, etc. Sometimes people buy textbooks by themselves, e.g. adults who want to (re-)learn, parents who think the books provided by school are inadequate, children who destroyed the copy they received at school... That textbooks are "paid for by public money" is reductio ad absurdum. The system is much more complex. However, I think that the state/EU (or US) should also fund textbooks and put them into the public domain, as long as using them isn't mandatory - that's a great idea and it never hurts to have one more option.
      - spookie 4y ago
DoughnutHole 4y ago
"Use nothing commercial ever" is probably too extreme. I'd agree with the parent that schools shouldn't be getting kids to use things like GSuite, but not solely because it's commercial - the problem is the data management practices of these companies, which the state should not be supporting by forcing children to use these services to complete their education and inevitably giving companies like Google huge amounts of personal data. This isn't a problem with textbooks, commercial or otherwise.

EUROCARE 4y ago

That's cool, but you can't give out mailboxes for free like you can give away computers. It needs to run somewhere, the servers maintained by someone. Do you have a better solution than Gmail? I know only about Microsoft, is that even an improvement?

lrvick 4y ago
I host email for hundreds of people with a $10/mo VPS. Schools classically self hosted their network services and they can do so again. It is a good opportunity to mentor future sysadmins too.
- EUROCARE 4y ago
  It's great that you do, but that's not a typical school admin skillset. People who know this have zero reason to slave for a school. > Schools classically self hosted their network services Back when encryption wasn't even needed, hackers were a curiosity and deliverability wasn't a concern. This is never coming back. School is a very important part of people's lives (parents, children, teachers, other staff), deliverability and security must be perfect. Schools also manage loads of very private data. As a parent, I don't want the school admin to touch it with a 10-meter pole, I want them to use a managed service that they can't screw up even if they tried very hard (and sometimes school admins look at data themselves - the less opportunity they have the better). > It is a good opportunity to mentor future sysadmins too. The point is to have working email that everyone can rely on, not to groom kids/teachers to become sysadmins. It's better for everyone if the school admin focuses on solving things no one else can solve (e.g. handing out the free computers and installing Linux on them) rather than wasting time tinkering with email hosting for public money.
0xedd 4y ago
You can Google free email services rather than use bing. Protonmail is one. Free version includes much more than what a student needs. Students can sign up themselves.
- EUROCARE 4y ago

koheripbal 4y ago

You think the government builds desks, blackboards, buildings, directly. Everything is outsourced to private companies. That's how economics works.

flatline 4y ago
Private companies can develop software with government data rights. Hosting isn’t free but they pay for an n-year contract with support and can find another vendor for the software and hosting in n years if they want. That’s a good collaboration between govt and industry, governments should insist on stuff like this so they retain ownership over what they paid for, as much as possible.
throwaway290 4y ago
Except the pesky difference that in other cases the school/gov purchases a product for students while in this case it pays nothing and supplies students as the product.
lrvick 4y ago
Those things are also not proprietary to any one company. Outsourcing labor to make generic things we could obtain elsewhere is not the same thing as teaching tools only one company controls. We should not use schools to further the vendor-lock-in of corporations.
gpm 4y ago
Using those things doesn't require that the students enter into a contract with the contractor, doesn't seem comparable.

exo762 4y ago

> School is obligatory, we really shouldn't employ commercial products in schools to begin with. I think a better formulation of this would be following. School is obligatory, we should not employ products that collect private information of students.

spookie 4y ago
Well, yeah I didn't mean to sound so extreme. I was just implying that a product intended for public use shouldn't mean "commercial", in the sense of an end consumer product. Your customer isn't the end consumer. The same applies to profucts sold to other companies.