"There's no such thing as free software."

[elfs]

Ken Starks of HeliOS, a small Linux advocacy group, recently ran into a headache when he encountered a teacher name Karen who was so angry about him giving Linux distro disks to kids at her middle school,

I called a confrence with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization. Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.

She's right, in one sense-- every minute spent developing open source software is a minute the developer "spent" without making a profit (well, okay, to a first approximation). Karen's confusion is tragic-- if you follow the link, you'll find that she believes that Microsoft's operating system is what kids will have to deal with in the real world, that Linux is little more than a "carnival show," and the Linux community does real harm to children by making them think that some things really are free.

Okay, so Karen is wrong, but I think most of the open source community doesn't understand why she's wrong, or what to say in response.

An operating system is not a commodity. Commodity: 'anything for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.' Wheat is wheat. Iron is iron. But Windows is not Ubuntu; they have qualitative differences between them.

But what is not qualitatively different is the underlying knowledge that the Microsoft Corporation and the Linux Community have in common. That is commodity knowledge. There are no real secrets to how to make an operating system, and anyone with enough time and energy can make one.

The same is true of a house or a car: building one of those is commodity knowledge. There's no secret there. The difference between a house and an operating system is that the source code of an operating system is exceptionally easy to copy, whereas the materials for a house are not. Software, therefore, has a ratchet: every time an improvement is added, it persists and is distributed in all future versions.

I think, if we're going to win this battle, we have to make these two points:

1. The Linux Operating System is built atop commodity knowledge everyone has access to, and
2. The Linux Operating System improves because every person who has the itch, "I wish that worked better for me" and scratches that itch makes it work better for everyone.

To succeed, we have to convince people of one salient detail: Operating systems are not mysterious. The knowledge on how to build one is available in every Barnes & Noble on the planet. Linux is just one operating system, but it's size and popularity naturally attract talented people to it, and it continues to improve because people want their computers to work for them, efficiently, fast, and error-free. The accessibility of source code gives people from one project the hope of learning from the lessons of other projects.

When you contract to build a house, you would hire a company with a good reputation. In that sense, we should always ask: does Microsoft have a good reputation? Or is it just the biggest game in town?

Comments

[alienor77310.livejournal.com]

... does real harm to children by making them think that some things really are free.

It's nice to see such overpowering idealism... I bet she tells kindergartners there's no Santa, too.

[ewhac.livejournal.com]

I think you give "Karen" too much intellectual credit -- your analysis is far more in-depth and thoughtful than I suspect Karen's was.

I would wager folding money that Karen was pulled in to a mandatory "Training Seminar" for school faculty held by the BSA/SPA/RIAA/MPAA/etc., and took both barrels of propoganda to the chest. She's not thinking, she's merely parroting the scary ghost stories she was told, and likely reinforced by equally scary policy statements issued by the school district counsel.

So, no. Absent supporting evidence, I'm not prepared to give Karen that much credit.

[ewhac.livejournal.com]

Okay, having now actually read more than just the pull-quote above, it seems the teacher is not merely an unwitting dupe -- she's an imbecile.

"...putting Linux on these machines is holding our kids back."

Well, I suppose, maybe, if you've foolishly mandated that your students submit all their writing assignments as MSWord files. Of course, OpenOffice addresses that issue. I can't even begin to imagine how to argue against such willful opacity.

"This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all."

I know a fellow in Cupertino who would jolly well like to speak to you about that. Look for the guy in the black turtleneck...

[mrf-arch.livejournal.com]

"Is our teachers learning?"

(Though, as an aside, I'm not sure your "house" analogy entirely holds up - the model of my house doesn't dictate my available furniture options the way my operating system dictates my software options.)

www.freesoftwareforkaren.com

[(Anonymous)]

I am Edward 'at' freesoftwareforkaren 'dot' com

I created the site http://freesoftwareforkaren.com after reading the HeliOS blog post. Check it out, the blog should be running within 12 hours if everything goes as planned.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

To succeed, we have to convince people of one salient detail: Operating systems are not mysterious.

While technically that's true because as you say, you can just get a book out of the library and find out how they work, it's far from actually true in the real world.

If you've spent any time doing tech support, you'd know that most people find the *operation* of a *mouse* mysterious. I don't even mean the knowledge that a mouse sends a computer signals about how it moves and what buttons are pressed, I mean the difference between "left click", "right click" and "double click". It appears to take years to master this skill. Even today, in the age of Facebook and instant messaging, the skills necessary to make the simplest "hello world" program or web page elude the vast majority of the population. It takes years of dedicated study to get to the point where someone could contribute to Linux (or any other operating system).

And truly, the same thing goes for building houses or fixing cars or wiring electronics. Most people couldn't tell the difference between 15 amp and 30 amp wiring (which can be, ah, fatal), or the difference between a drive shaft and an alternator. Most of them are perfectly happy being this clueless and would really prefer to leave those bits of knowledge to other people.

So trying to convince the public that building an operating system is really no big deal and that anyone can do it... well, that's one mountain I'd rather leave to someone else.

[pteryxx.livejournal.com]

I disagree that people are actually happy with their cluelessness. They've been trained by decades of consumer propaganda, routine mismanagement, and holding-pen schooling into a state of learned helplessness and absolution from responsibility. Thus they believe that they cannot and should not learn how to solve their own problems, *and* that this is a normal condition of adulthood. But life improvement advice is full of exhortations to go out and master hobbies or skills, and people increasingly are doing so; witness the growing Maker movement. In my experience, if you can get any group of adults to try a new game, as long as it's sugar-coated with enough silliness to break down their well-trained resistance to learning, they quickly become overjoyed and enthusiastic. So I think while the vast majority of people are by default comfortable with their helplessness, I don't believe they are happy.

As far as Linux is concerned, most people don't need to be taught to build their own operating system - they just need to be taught to seek out and trust the advice of Linux community experts, instead of assuming an expert can only be trusted if they charge an hourly rate on par with an attorney.

It's actually worse than just this, unfortunately.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

One fairly computer-literate friend I know, college-educated and about to graduate in a computer-related field in fact, still believes the FUD that the GPL is so viral that you can't write code in a GPLed editor or compile it with a GPLed compiler without the GPL applying to that code. They believe this because one of their friends at the school that was taking law classes said so, basically, and believe it so strongly they've gotten a non-GPA-affecting drop from classes when they were not able to find non-GPL tools to work with to do the class homework with.

There's hundreds of attacks on the Linux computing front that are being attacked by 'common sense' approaches from the other side, and unfortunately many of them are sticking far better than you might think.

Re: It's actually worse than just this, unfortunately.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I enjoy pointing out that Quake and DOOM are developed with Emacs and GCC, that Bugzilla is used for internal tracking, and that these products are commercial successes on the Linux platform.

Because, y'know, ID gives it all away fro free.

Re: It's actually worse than just this, unfortunately.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Even better: Quake and DOOM were compiled with GCC 3.0. Not even the latest & greatest.

[cadetstar.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, the company I work in IT for is not nearly as old-fashioned. Our Director of IT runs a Mac with the necessary Windows emulation to interface with our servers, and is completely in favor of using quality software no matter if it's open-source or not.

The only pushback I ever got for open-source software was for an open-source VPN since there was no company to back up any security issues.

Our new websites are coded with Rails (two of them b/c they are database-served, the other because it was the easiest way for us to do it in-house), I use GIMP to modify images for the website or other purposes, and our servers uses a third-party PDF printer since we didn't want to purchase Acrobat Standard just to get the printing capabilities.

Does it work? Is it (relatively) secure and stable? How easy is it to use? How much does it cost? - Questions we ask in that order.

-Michael

[(Anonymous)]

Lets also not forget that most of the time (at least in my experience) IT teachers in education, this is IT teachers and not computing teachers, aren't very technical to begin with. It's like expecting an interior designer to know about how houses are built, they don't they just make things look pretty. Sadly IT teachers have more influence on people's computers.