Re: [OS:N:] Re: Questionaire about the support of students rights and the freedom in the learning environment

--- Charles McColm <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-08-12 at 12:12, James Michael DuPont wrote:
> > I am not saying redhat should open up its content,
> > it has the right to sell content. The FSEDU project seeks to
> compete
> > with RedHat and others by providing content.
> 
> First, my apologies for having misunderstood.  On your web site you
> say
> FSEDU is "A project which has the goal of promoting free access to
> learning materials..."  You may not have intended to suggest that Red
> Hat should open up its content but you've made an indirect comparison
> between the two organizations and through that comparison implied
> that
> "free access" is one of the components that makes FSEDU worthy of
> praise
> and Red Hat not.

I think that redhat should try and take away less rights of the
students while making their profits. I also now think that they should
contribute the updates back to the free software docuementation after a
certain  time has passed and that they made their profit off of them.
The argument that their materials are up to data means that the older
materials go out of date, when they are outdated, then could be put
back into the community so that at least the badly outdated but freely
available reference materials might be updated to a marginally new
level.

> That led me to believe that at least one of the
> things
> you were after was to get Red Hat to open its courseware.  

That is not reasonable. It is reasonable to ask them not to take away
the basic freedoms of the students in the processing of making a buck.

>That said,
> I
> definately agree with the second half, using open source software and
> standards.  
> 
> > The courseware, and acedemy, when used are designed to remove the
> basic
> > rights of the students to view and edit the source code of the
> software
> > used. 
> 
> Not being in the course I cannot comment on what software they use or
> what file formats they adhere to.  I cannot imagine the academy
> trying
> to restrict students from editing code like:
> 
> #include <stdio.h>
> main ()
> {
>  printf("Hello World");
> }
> 
> Unless you're SCO you probably won't try to lay claim to any
> code/shell
> scripting unless you have specifically developed it for the purpose
> of
> the course.

I can imagine that the workbooks and questions are copyrighted and
jealously guarded as consumables. Even if they are simple such example
programs are under a stronger copyright than other forms of copyrighted
material. Redhat will not want to publish them.

> > 2. An school offering from an opensource vendor using non-free
> software
> > is questionable to me. But it is thier right to choose the vendor.
> The
> > issue I have is support of open standards and the freedom of the
> > Java and Flash are not free or standard software. 
> 
> Java and Flash may not be free as in speech but I was under the
> impression that the plugins written for Mozilla under Linux are!  As
> for
> not being standard I'm sure there are thousands of Java programmers
> who
> do feel Java has caught on as a standard.

But is is not an open standard. Java has repeatly decided not to open
up to an international standardization process for their own reasons.
The license agreement to download the java runtime is designed to take
away the freedoms of the person downloading it. A student should have
the right to refuse to accept that license, but still be able to use
the courseware with alternative free products (gjv or kaffee).  The
FSedu will help them with this process.

> 
> > 3. As a provider of education about "opensource" I find it a great
> > omission to conver the open content licences. I also find that the
> > wording of the following section strange  :
> 
> I think it's admirable that you question Red Hat's choice but I'm not
> sure I see how Red Hat could deliver content without resorting to at
> least Java.  If it was all text, CSS, and DHTML the courseware
> probably
> wouldn't be as interactive or interesting.

There are many ways to deliver content. Java is not the issue per say,
but the question is of requirements and license. As far as I can tell,
the courseware license prevents it from being decompiled and ported to
a free platform outside of the standard java env. This is an serious
limitiation.

> 
> > "Users of Linux depend on the market and IT publishing industry to
> > supply useful printed reference guides and keep them up to date.
> Red
> > Hat does not endorse particular guides, since we cannot vouch that
> they
> 
> That's a good point, but note the wording "useful printed guides." 
> You
> could argue that the following sentence does not specifically state
> printed guides but I think it is pretty clear from the first sentence
> that Red Hat is talking about not endorsing particular printed
> guides. 
> If Red Hat is supplying a printed guide with the courseware then they
> probably should consider rethinking the statement.
> 
> > 3.3 Free software developers dont depend on printed reference
> manuals,
> > they depend on up to date content. This content does not need to be
> > printed at all by an large printer..
> 
> Well I haven't developed any whiz-bang software for Linux, but I have
> developed a few applications for "The Working Centre Linux" and I did
> need to refer to printed manuals, as well as help from other open
> source
> developers to start and finish some of the software. 
> 
> Personally I find it much simpler to read a book than read
> documentation
> online.  

As I said, the free docuementation can be printed out at the leisure of
the reader. If you have a good laser printer or a copy shop, you can
print out whatever you need at a much lower prices. If you really want
a hardcover binding, that will be expensive. But generally a copy shop
will be cheaper that a hardcover book.


>(Mind you I am reading more documentation on my computer now
> that I have a 19" monitor - a Sun Microsystems monitor no less
> *chuckle*
> - I bought it at a sale "as is" and it worked great)
> 
> > We need more ways to allow people to collect and distribute up to
> date
> > information about free software. We also need to make sure that you
> can
> > learn all about this software without giving up your freedom.
> 
> This is something I've found frustrating in the past.  Open source
> software is developed so fast that printed documentation can go out
> of
> date very quickly.  Unfortunately it also seems to apply to some of
> the
> HOWTO's as well.  For example, the Handspring-Visor HOWTO really
> could
> be rewritten to include expanded USB coverage.  It is a wonderful
> HOWTO
> but the expanded coverage would help more people.  Palm-HOWTO anyone?

I think that the creation of better tools in the introspector.sf.net
project and the semantic web to organize and collect the cvs logs, the
mailing lists the bug reports, the patches and chatlogs, the source
code of the programs into a large fact database will make a good step
foward in keeping the users with a more up to date view on the current
public knowledge will help alot. 

The FSEDU project is working on new forms of collaboration and
distribution of knowledge that will allow the colloborative creating of
documentation and the eventual creating of printed materials by gradual
refinement and annotation and review of this public knowledge base.

This can only happen when the students and users retain their rights to
the consumable goods collected when they are working on the learning
the system. That means all of the questions that they have, the
problems and errors occuring need to be treated as valuable resource.
These resources will be tracked and published with the various
solutions. When this process is done over a period of years with
thousands of users, a huge public repository of knowledge is built that
outweighs any possible single companies or persons individual work.

Of course this is a dream, but it is a realizable dream, the current
research in the semantic web is slowly moving the web towards a
situation where such a public learning process will become feasable and
practical. Applying the principles of knowledge representation and
extraction to the learning processes, the software development process
and the bug and support process is the key to supporting this long term
goal.

mike

=====
James Michael DuPont
http://introspector.sourceforge.net/

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