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Re:GitHub goes to school by krapp on Monday February 10, 2014 @04:14PM (#7213878)
What is 'anti-educational' about proprietary software?

At the very least, one can't expect CS students to have an education which is valid for the workforce without any exposure to proprietary software at all.

Re:GitHub goes to school by davexunit on Monday February 10, 2014 @04:27PM (#7213976)
>What is 'anti-educational' about proprietary software?

Proprietary software doesn't give you the freedom to read and modify the source code. The software license forbids learning about it.

>one can't expect CS students to have an education which is valid for the workforce without any exposure to proprietary software at all

There's a lot more to CS than learning to be a code monkey.

Re:GitHub goes to school by krapp on Monday February 10, 2014 @05:17PM (#7214239)
>Proprietary software doesn't give you the freedom to read and modify the source code. The software license forbids learning about it.

This is true. However, it is still possible to be taught to code on a Windows machine in Visual Studio, or in Java for Android, etc. Your point of view has merit but it also has a limited context. The tools do matter and some of those tools are closed-source.

>There's a lot more to CS than learning to be a code monkey.

And yet, sooner or later everyone has to eat.

Re:GitHub goes to school by akerl_ on Monday February 10, 2014 @05:46PM (#7214356)
Yes, we know what "proprietary software" means. We're looking for clarification on how using a proprietary tool that allows students to better share source code and collaborate with each other and the society at large counts as "anti-educational".
Re:GitHub goes to school by spindritf on Monday February 10, 2014 @04:27PM (#7213974)
What is 'anti-educational' about proprietary software?

It doesn't allow users/students to analyse, or learn about, its inner-workings. I don't know how important that is but with git being so easy to deploy, why not use something students can maintain?

Re:GitHub goes to school by Zikes on Monday February 10, 2014 @04:45PM (#7214100)
Isn't that going a bit overboard in an educational setting, though? Seems to me like it'd be like showing up for a drivers ed class and spending the first semester learning about the history of internal combustion engines.

Sometimes it's best to start with something that transparently "just works", make the students aware of other options like gitlab, and let them explore those if they wish.

Re:GitHub goes to school by srean on Monday February 10, 2014 @05:12PM (#7214221)
Depends on what the end goal of the education system is: to make you a driver/chauffeur or to make you someone who is going to design the car of the future.

How to stage and sequence the exposure to the details is indeed important. I am not advocating exposure to the details right away, but the option has to be available at a reasonable price (be it in money, or in time).

There is also the "teach a person to fish" thing, rather than handing him/her a fish. Although many are in the business of handing out fishes, stale ones too.

Re:GitHub goes to school by ianstormtaylor on Monday February 10, 2014 @08:18PM (#7215028)
That assumes that everyone who was using GitHub for hosting their classwork is engineer capable of hosting their own Git server. What if they are working on frontend HTML/CSS things? or just learning Python? There are lots of valid uses for version control that don't mean you already have the ability to even try to host your own VCS.

No one argues that you need to have people host their own web server to start learning how to write Javascript. In fact, most would argue against hosting your own that early on. It's not beneficial, and more likely to end up tangential annoyances than solving the problems that matter for the person's skill level.

Just because someone teaches you a different part of the stack first doesn't mean they are handing out fish...

Re:GitHub goes to school by judk on Monday February 10, 2014 @08:18PM (#7215031)
Students can maintain a local git repo and just push their results to github. In fact, they must, that's how Git works!