On Sun, 2019-11-24 at 18:25 +0200, Demetris Karayiannis wrote:
Hi Nico,
thanks for reading
Personally I believe we already have so many different topics to focus on (governmental policies, PMPC, Open Standards, Router freedom, DRM exemptions, eduction, etc.) and so I like to align my efforts with the FSFE campaigns to have a greater impact. Doing a few things right, rather than a lot of things badly. But of course you are free to initiate an effort yourself.
Yes, that is more than fair enough. I was already aware of that, and in my original email I extended the proposal to readers of the list working on the issue beyond their FSFE affiliation. Even with the idea for a campaign set aside, I'm looking forward to reading more people's takes on the topic.
Thanks for clarifying. I certainly support the cause. There are multiple arguments to be made:
Privacy: schools migrating their infrastructure to cloud SaaS companies, with questionable licenses.
Independence: what good is it learning skills if you learn them on proprietary software. Sure it might an industry standard (e.g. Adobe Creative suite), but your skills now depend partly on the policy of the software vendor.
Reuse: educational institutions should help education. And having material that can be shared freely, advances education as a whole.
Improvement: students can actively contribute to learning materials, to improve it for next generations of students.
From your writing I get the impression that this was an incident uncommon at your institution.
It was probably unwise to make so much of my email about this specific instance. It was one of the least problematic examples of forced use of proprietary software in academia. But it was the incident that sparked the idea, that's why I brought it up.
Alright, than that troubled your message. But thanks for clarifying your intent.
Kind regards, Nico