1) the software you teach them should last them for a while. That means it shouldn't be to limiting (even if that means more user friendly). It should additionally be something where you can assume it will be around for a while in that form.

2) It should make it easy for them to work in the field that they are in.

3) The work they create in that programme should be readable for as long as possible (even when the creators of the software are gone)

4) We the technically educated are supposed to teach the societal ramifications of certain software products as well (privacy, surveillance) and how to guard from those. So software that doesn't spy, isn't creepy and etc gets a plus as well

Students don't have a ton of money, so if there is a free and open source solution that isn't bad on quality compared to the commercial (or data stealing) alternatives, I'd go for that, because it helps with nearly all the points above.

I am however not a friend of teaching people tools they cannot use. So while teaching someone Blender instead of Maya makes a ton of sense, because Blender is great and getting better, teaching someone Cinelerra when Premiere or Avid are a much better choice functionality wise is something I wouldn't do just for the heck of it.

Ah yes, the "people use calculators in the real world so long division is a waste of time" argument

That’s flatly false.

Please don’t spread FUD. Your ignorance of better solutions is not proof they don’t exist.

You can go to https://demo.bigbluebutton.org/gl/signup, click “Sign up with Google” (or Twitter, or Microsoft 365, or create a BigBlueButton account), possibly click your Google Account profile picture/username, and done. You now have infinite BigBlueButton rooms. You can go to https://www.instructure.com/canvas/try-canvas#free-account and create a free account or “Request a demo of the full Canvas platform, and we’ll schedule an expert to walk you through the software.”

You're saying Google doesn't have privacy issues?

What would be the threat model here? Google would crawl the templates of the exercises and use it to fine tune their ads to the parents related with that content? NSA would know that Michael doesn't know that 4+4=8? Thinking about risk analysis, would you take this risk instead of invest taxpayer money? In my case in Germany, each State is coming up with their own solution, developing something which doesn't attend the minimum requirements (feature wise, privacy wise, supported platforms) and etc. For example one issue that we found in the last months: A lot of refugee kids have just a mobile telephone, but some solutions don't support it well. What do you think about usability? Totally wrong, Language Support? Just German (Yes many kids came to Germany and their parents don't speak German, how can they help their kids with something that they don't understand?), I could write hours about how wrong all evaluated solutions are.. And for sure their are not opening their source code, so how is it better?

Regarding Privacy, do you trust your data to your country more than you trust to Google? Maybe you do, but that's definitely not true for everyone or every country.

P.S: Look that my first statement and whole argumentation is based on the COVID-19 scenario and the issue that I'm raising is if any Country or State should be building their own similar solution with taxpayer money in a short amount of time.

I earned my living with Blender as a VFX Freelancer (in Europe), so saying Maya is a must here is a bit outdated IMO.

You don’t get that with free software, and for your average professor/admissions rep/grant writer/alumni nagger that’s a big deal. It doesn’t matter if it’s the 100% perfect solution to every problem they have... if they don’t know how to use it.

There are plenty of vendors who support Free software. They will install Free software and configure Free Software and provide whatever level of training is required for Free software. What they don't do is provide that value for free.

The difference between Free software and non-Free software is not that there is no training involved. It is that if you purchase Free software you end up with Free software, and if you purchase non-Free software, you end up with non-Free software. That's it.

Oh, and if someone decides they want to cut costs by not paying for something of value that they need, they will get what they paid for. That's orthogonal to the liberty of the underlying software.

The big difference from the perspective of the schools is that proprietary software is backed by a big corporation that has made taking care of your needs their business model. There's nothing inherently stopping companies from offering the same quality of service with free software, but in practice free software often means doing things yourself and relying on a community of volunteers.

Meanwhile, for the big corps it's fine if this is a loss leader, because it teaches a new generation to use their products. You've got to get them while they're young, after all.

Depends on the product, there might be several to choose from. In the case of LibreOffice, there's an official list of recognised support providers, but LibreOffice don't offer paid support themselves. [0][1]

> The big difference from the perspective of the schools is that proprietary software is backed by a big corporation that has made taking care of your needs their business model.

With Free Software, the support provider might be the same organisation that develops the software, it depends. If you want support for Red Hat, you can get paid support from Red Hat themselves, or go with an independent support company. Red Hat have a certification scheme so you can get some official assurance they know what they're doing. [2]

[0] https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/

[1] https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/certification/

[2] https://www.redhat.com/en/services/certification/certificati...

This happens because "free software" is a terrible name. It should be changed to "freedom-respecting software".

So many people have been conditioned that "Free is bad, and steals your data". Which is kind of ironic, but unfortunately true in my experience.

The only problem is that the usage of "Free" worries me. I recognize that it's for "Freedom", but Joe McConsumer both doesn't, and doesn't care enough to listen about it.

I got told the other day that Linux is bad because it's "Off brand Windows" because it's "free". This was after explaining the gratis/libre difference.

You can’t expect the guy who has dedicated his career to the ancient Egyptian papyrus scrolls about floods in the Nile contributing to the growth of Mesopotamia to also just poke around with this new web-based tool and figure out how it works so he can transfer all his students over to it. He’ll just keep going with the printed page like he has for 40 years of teaching.

That’s fine, but relatively expensive when you consider that the IT guy’s time could have been better used elsewhere and that the IT department didn’t get any additional funding because they saved the university untold amounts of money that were provided by grants.

It’s also difficult to con alumni into donating for “Joe to do training on blah”... but donating to purchase the revolutionary new software from blah to increase admissions and donations while reducing labor is an easy sell.

I don't recall having seen much targeting end users.

Occasionally, it's a way to fund development.

Personally I'd say most of the time the problem is the lack of documentation, help, manuals, guides etc.

I had so many times when I had a problem with a software under Linux and basically you have to spend hours in Google trying to find that stackexchange/reddit/askubuntu thread where you might find your answer, or not.

I understand: documentation is hard. It's tedious and it's difficult to get right for all the likely/major audiences involved. That's not a good excuse, though. The amount of fad-driven, cargo-cult coding and the like has just exploded in the last few years, much of it essentially copy-pasta from sites like Stackoverflow or whatever a Google search throws up.

The iPhone 10 or 11 or wherever we are, does...

...not ship with a manual! Have you ever noticed that? In fact, documentation is the reason why people struggle with Linux, not the lack thereof. iOS tries to make things obvious. But obvious means obvious for some people and I assume they maximise for the set of people looking for a smartphone and perhaps more money than average, with some vague I idea of what kind of UI "looks current".

In fact, there is a story about a somewhat famous programmer going on sabbatical with only an installation of one of the BSD variants and from the documentation was able to make commits to the code... Maybe someone remembers who it was? It was mentioned on HN comments.

Having said that, yes, it is difficult to read documentation! And that's why people struggle with Linux, because it is a massive time investment.

And yes, one time I was fooling with NetBSD and went from zero to hello-world kernel device driver with just the man pages. So it's not surprising Carmack would be able to do the same with OpenBSD.

In my experience, the only way that differs from proprietary software is that developers of free software are less likely to ban you or threaten legal action for drawing attention to said problem.

I was a student worker at a university with a documentation / training dept. We maintained a wiki used by faculty and staff. We encouraged adoption with other groups, and built out a library of articles on tech resources, like how to use screen recording software to make and edit videos for the classroom.

We also had dedicated hours in one of the computer labs, where one of us would be present to help anyone with questions on using Blackboard, wiki, etc.

So in some cases they are trying, but to your original point, we only had 3-4 people, mostly part time trying to provide training and documentation. I think we made a difference, but there was a lot more that could be done we didn't have resources for.

This is a very “blue pill” way of looking at technology. Like when a huge company releases a SaaS product, and it observed a high bounce rate from the first few days of trial usage of your new Educational Software, blah blah blah, the metrics, blah blah, improve documentation to improve the metric, because that logically seems to be related to the bounce rate, and look there’s this Net Promoter Score survey that says people didn’t use the stuff we put in there or they seem confused so of course onboarding is what we’re missing...

Linux is in disguise the most used operating system in the world, it’s the worst example to bring up because you’re talking about real pain points. But this whole idea of “pain points” and the metrics and the onboarding and documentation stuff, this is just a bunch of post hoc rationalizing business speak, a form of astrology in product development that would have been 200% wrong about Linux’s success and will continue to be wrong about all sorts of software. And then you’ll jump into pedantry, like “oh I meant specifically software under Linux not Linux itself,” or whatever.

Listen it doesn’t matter, documentation doesn’t really matter, the people writing documentation for unsuccessful or useless stuff will not make it useful by writing documentation. Documentation can’t fix what’s wrong with a piece of broken software. However it is an enteprise product, it is a piece of utterly worthless differentiation that salespeople can go out and sell and buyers can go buy, and the money changed hands, so of course everyone is out there talking about how important it is.

Don’t use software that’s hard for you to use! No one is forcing you to write systemd units, iptables commands, command like arguments for ffpmeg etc. And yet, it must piss you off so much that there are people basically selling this free software in wrappers. You’re willing to try at least, which is good, and it’s not coming from a place of valuing your time or from lack of knowledge or accessibility - it’s from the ethos of not being ripped off, of giving the people doing the valuable thing (writing the software not the docs) most of the value, and not some commercial halfwit middleman. The ethos of being revolted about giving money to some giant company, so that some VP who doesn’t do anything can chauffeur his kids to their pod in the repurposed yoga studio on 1 Main Street of his suburban home’s town.

This is what free software for education is about. When the time isn’t super important, when the money is either not spent or sucked up by cronies - certainly not spent efficiently - you want a piece of software that is compatible with the ethos of what education is really about.

Education, more than anything else, is fundamentally opposed to the enriching of middlemen. In software middlemen tend to slap documentation on free stuff.

Once the school is in the boat the cost to switch is dramatic so from there on in the closed software vendor can let them suffer and move on to the next juicy target.

We went with Moodle because it was easier to setup and maintain. It also is much less stressful on the client computer. If you read the Canvas install, its pretty much another group who advertises open source but then has an installation procedure that truly sucks. Canvas wants you to pay for hosting. Moodle is super easy by comparison.

I would say if the govt of a certain area mandated/encouraged free software usage, and also invested money into development (to fill in missing features) and support and training (to improve teacher skills), then things will work.

I agree that using libre software without support is difficult (my self-installed webwork server crashed during the quiz today).

Administrating systems is generally hell. They have to be kept updated, secured, etc. The rise of closed SaaS is in part to free people from the curse of IT and system administration.

Can we make IT and admin easier? Yes, but nobody has done the work and it isn’t likely anyone will since there is no economic model.

Although at that point I question what advantage free software gives you - you can't change it and you are still at the mercy of the hosting company since you aren't able to host it yourself.

Unfortunately, this disregards another aspect of a pragmatic picture, which is that to start off with, probably none of the teachers at a random school would even be able to open a terminal on some linux setup... Which leads us to... YouTube! Hmm. I think we are stuck again.

For two years my church class was taught by a single elderly volunteer, who I remember providing some simple tech support for during our weekly in person classes — she was not a technical person. But our regular online classes went smoothly, without a technical hitch that I can remember. This year we have a brand new teacher (who also has no prior experience using Canvas AFAIK) and 100% online classes (cause covid), and I had the pleasure of preventing our weekly synchronous classes from occurring via Zoom by recommending BigBlueButton. It has also worked flawlessly. And it pains me every time I have to switch between tabs for the Zoom malware and separate tools like Nearpod in secular school, when BigBlueButton has so much more education-focused functionality baked in.

So, while I believe there probably are free software solutions with insufficient support somewhere, my personal experience (as well as others’ anecdotes like those on BigBlueButtons homepage¹ or the MIT Professor/FSF member who teaches his class with purely free software², and the relatively empirical evidence that Canvas claim³) can’t attest to rumors of them being anything more than FUD.

1. https://bigbluebutton.org/ “Our instructors love BigBlueButton. With our previous web-conferencing solution our users encountered many technical and usability problems that caused a lot of support effort on our part. With BigBlueButton, the support issues are almost non-existent. We are constantly impressed with the level of quality in this open source project and it works without any prior knowledge. ” Marc Matthes Director of Computer Networking Programs and Program Developer, Distance Learning Department, Iowa Central Community College

2. (admittedly he isn’t anywhere near lacking in technical skill, and neither are his students, but on the other hand he was an early adopter during a high-stress time last Spring) https://www.gnu.org/education/teaching-my-mit-classes-with-o... “I am pleased to report that my classes were successfully presented, my students were well served, and we were all reasonably happy with the results.” Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He helped found the Free Software Foundation in 1985.

3. https://www.instructure.com/canvas/ “Canvas is the World's Fastest-Growing Learning Management Platform” “Over 30% of Higher Ed Institutions Choose Canvas”