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A comment on GitHub goes to school. Parent comment

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.

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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.

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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".
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