Why aren't more universities using open source?

its all about lobbyism. high ranked professors and people who manage the university very often have their friends in managemant positions in corporations. For corporations its quite incentive to sponsor technologies to universities because students will work with it, and students familiar with a product will then when they work and have a management position again choose the product they learned to cope with.

I know of various universities where this happens like this. I researched this before my studies to decide which uni I would join, and that was the reason I joined a public university ans not a private one.

Another point is, very often professors are also in management position in corporations. e.g. their career path and dissertation led to a product which then was the basis for founding a company. Students of that professor will then quite likely work with the tools of the professors company.
This happened in a few of my courses regarding hardware design, we had to use the tool of our electrical engineering professors company, and also for vhdl design we were similarly restricted.

There are various good programs out there, but IMHO those can never be enough... the imagination of The FreeBSD Foundation/Mozilla/Linux Foundation/ Apache Foundation etc. sponsoring universities is a nice one
 
rootbert said:
its all about lobbyism. high ranked professors and people who manage the university very often have their friends in managemant positions in corporations.
Click to expand...

(I recall a very similar conversation in another thread)

I agree with this and have also noticed a few additional reasons:

1) "Of course we should teach Microsoft because who doesn't use Microsoft. It is the "standard"?"
Yes... people still actually think this. Where does this idea come from? Is it similar to the stupid late 80's opinion that "No-one ever got fired for choosing IBM"?

2) The students are a little bit blinded by "brands". They would always choose Maya over Blender, MS Office over Libreoffice, Unity over Godot. They actively seem to want to use proprietary software with fancy websites and no community input. This is a form of the Stockholm syndrome.

It is extremely frustrating to teach them to use entirely open-source technologies as part of the course unit, then leave them to their own devices for two seconds (i.e for final year project), only to find that they have followed some ratty little tutorial that has got them using Microsoft Visual Studio because "it is so cool; you can right click and auto-generate an empty function body".

If we banned them from needlessly using proprietary products, we would get a poor NSS score; this would affect the success of the University; we basically have no choice. The only thing I can currently do is actively support using pirated software to ensure that I do not contribute to the dictatorship of large IT companies; whilst at the same time satisfying the student's expectations. If we can weaponise piracy to kill off these non-ethical corporations, then that is a big win.

Though in some ways it is good, it honestly is starting to separate the technical candidates from the pretenders; especially in the game development related courses. It is almost possible to predict a grade for a student entirely by their choice of technologies without needing to first look at their work.

Disclaimer: These are my personal opinions; the University I work for has no clue about my madness! Any money I "save" from piracy, I send to local charities and open-source projects that I do care about. It doesn't make it "right" in a legal sense; but I sleep very well at night!
 
kpedersen said:
The only thing I can currently do is actively support using pirated software to ensure that I do not contribute to the dictatorship of large IT companies; whilst at the same time satisfying the student's expectations. If we can weaponise piracy to kill off these non-ethical corporations, then that is a big win.
Click to expand...

IMHO thats the wrong weapon to fight those corporations: when you enable other people access to pirated software you in the end feed them because you help them increase their userbase. They really don't care whether its pirated software for individuals - they seek for decision makers and users to sell their products to as many companies as possible. e.g. Microsoft never really cared about pirated software - they knew that this increases the userbase and establishes a so called standard in corporations because everyone able to work with a pc more or less used Windows and Office. That was part or their plan, otherwise they would have implemented a real copy protection from day one.
 
Last time I was in school (~2006), Microsoft offered generous free access to many software products to students. We only had to register to get personal license keys and to download iso images. The only restriction was that the license key fades out after we finish the school. It was allowed to use the software further, but no new installation.
A well calculated move from Microsoft, don't you think?
Kids and Students learn to use Microsoft products only and later they remain on this kind of software.
It's a bit like a drug dealer who offers free samples on the schoolyard.
 
kpedersen said:
Though in some ways it is good, it honestly is starting to separate the technical candidates from the pretenders; especially in the game development related courses. It is almost possible to predict a grade for a student entirely by their choice of technologies without needing to first look at their work.
Click to expand...
Which kind of technologies for instance?
 
rootbert said:
Microsoft never really cared about pirated software - they knew that this increases the userbase and establishes a so called standard in corporations
Click to expand...

I do understand that but I still have to manage student expectations and if we leave these products out entirely they will feel that they are not learning the "industry standards".

At least by not activating a product online (and patching the DRM out of the binary instead); the company bean counters will not include that sale in their official figures.

As a developer myself; I feel developers should get paid for their work. However if I developed non-ethical software or lobbied it in unethical ways then I feel that I do not deserve to get paid and that is yet another way that I justify it to myself XD

Ordoban said:
Last time I was in school (~2006), Microsoft offered generous free access to many software products to students.
Click to expand...
Yes they still do The MSDNAA (Microsoft Developers Network Academic Alliance). You are right this is exactly akin to a gateway drug. Apple has also done similar by marketing their toys to students. It has generally worked; Apple has entered many places within the workplace.

Spartrekus said:
Which kind of technologies for instance?
Click to expand...

A good candidate will use "boring" stuff such as C++, SDL, OpenGL, CMake, Doxygen to make i.e a 2D game. It will generally be well done; include unit tests, doxygen documentation and have decent memory testing and performance profiling done to it and version control will be used throughout.

A weak candidate will basically opt for an easy route and choose Unity3D for a 2D game which also tends to imply no unit testing; no systematic documentation; zero testing and version control will almost always be drop box. Their code will then also be a mish mash of random crappy snippets copied from stack overflow and the game will rarely work. This has almost given Unity a name for itself around here as not being able to produce finished games.
 
Most of this is due to human nature. Very few want to take responsibility for others. When you have the possibility to change things, you are suddenly responsible for them. And many people can't deal with that. They don't want it.
 
Ordoban said:
Last time I was in school (~2006), Microsoft offered generous free access to many software products to students. We only had to register to get personal license keys and to download iso images. The only restriction was that the license key fades out after we finish the school. It was allowed to use the software further, but no new installation.
A well calculated move from Microsoft, don't you think?
Kids and Students learn to use Microsoft products only and later they remain on this kind of software.
It's a bit like a drug dealer who offers free samples on the schoolyard.
Click to expand...

Microsoft has done this many times: offered "free" operating systems to other countries so they spread their userbase. Same thing they did back in the 80's and 90's when you could only get a PC or laptop with Windows because Microsoft had agreements with hardware vendors (same thing now actually). They flooded the market, making Windows and Office the "standard" when it wasn't actually a standard but just what everyone used, mainly because they didn't know any better.

Definitely a business tactic and when I throw this out there to colleagues, I remind them that it isn't the best (quality) solution, just one that everyone uses.
 
The original article doesn't talk about Microsoft. It doesn't talk about the use of free versus non-free software in classes. It does not talk about students.

It does talk about researchers (who are professionals) using software for their own highly specialized purposes. It points out that much of that highly specialized software is commercial and not open source, and it exhorts those researchers to use open source software instead. The type of software it talks about is not OSes, or compilers, or computer science teaching, but specialized software that is used in laboratories. The example it gives is software to analyze data from a tensiometer, and the author of the article is asking people to stop using commercial software, and instead use the open source software he and his research group have developed. Fundamentally, what the article amount to: A person who has developed a certain piece of software is advertising it, and wanting other people to use it.

The author also claims that open source software offers many advantages, in this specific situation. Personally, I find that suggestion offensive. The people who run these research groups tend to be very intelligent, and capable of making tradeoffs; in his example he talks about academic researchers in surface chemistry, who are typically people with a PhD. If they are using a particular software, they probably do that for good reasons. Dragging these deeply technical decisions into the realm of superficial politics doesn't help anyone.
 
Unfortunately, being "intelligent" isn't the same as having knowledge about subjects outside of a persons (narrow) field of academic research. One would hope that a person with academic background also knows quite a bit about other things (aka is "broad-minded" and have a wide field of interests) instead of being narrow-minded and only interested in what he or she does. I have met people of both "persuasions" over the years. I still hope that there are more broad-minded than narrow-minded people in the world. :)

Oh, and anyone is free to feel offended by my statement, of course.
 
According to my experience is various universities and research institutes the story is this. While science departments usually are very much into open source, expecially Linux and all open stuff they can get. Engineering depts. are very much into Windows.

Humanities, from what i heard, use just Windows because people there never needs (are able to use) stuff diverging from MS-Office suite.

Let's forget Humanities and focus on Engineering. In Enginerring you are faced with real world problems that many people want to solve. So, let's start easy, CAD, try to find a professional one that works in Linux. It does not exist. Then, I remember vaguely some very specialized software for designing digital circuits. There are specific tools which have driver and guess what, 90% of times driver is only for Windows (eg Oscilloscopes, 3d printers, CNC etc. ). So the point is, for Engineers there is plenty of companies out there that are willing to invest in build professinal software/devices/drivers to solve their problem. Because they are regular building-stuff problems, that have a market.

After that. You are an Engineer, you are supposed to go out of school and don't, in the majority of cases, do rearch or teaching, you are supposed to go out and build working stuff for the market. Like it or not the market runs Windows, somebody uses MacOS. Again, MacOS has not a pro CAD !
 
Actually...
What about if state votes against opensource in future? today there is some support but who knows the future.
This would be beneficial for big corporates. US or EU would definitely support it.
The good reason would be that it is imperative, because there are too much hackers, internet crimes, ... and so on.
Politicians could vote a new law.

It would not be surprising that at the end, the state monitors and rules you and your life (so said democratically), in some 20 years.
 
Spartrekus said:
Actually...
What about if state votes against opensource in future? today there is some support but who knows the future.
This would be beneficial for big corporates. US or EU would definitely support it.
The good reason would be that it is imperative, because there are too much hackers, internet crimes, ... and so on.
Politicians could vote a new law.

It would not be surprising that at the end, the state monitors and rules you and your life (so said democratically), in some 20 years.
Click to expand...

and what if "the state" votes against forums ?

if you don't live in a dictatorship you can 1) vote against them 2) join other people who think like you and start the opposition.
 
Crivens said:
Most of this is due to human nature. Very few want to take responsibility for others. When you have the possibility to change things, you are suddenly responsible for them. And many people can't deal with that. They don't want it.
Click to expand...
Those who don't lift a finger or don't attempt to help, can't blame. Those who are incompetent that make things worse of anything they involve in also can't blame. Some people are so incompetent, the best way they can help, is to get the hell out of the way.
 
sidetone said:
Those who don't lift a finger or don't attempt to help, can't blame. Those who are incompetent that make things worse of anything they involve in also can't blame. Some people are so incompetent, the best way they can help, is to get the hell out of the way.
Click to expand...
Oops. Did you mention me? It's perfectly matched :oops:
 
I don't care about open source or not. I only care if it cheap enough to buy a personal licence and good enough to solve the problems. Recently I tried to plot 3D parametric surface equation and guest what? All of the free online graph plotter sucks and only Wolfram Alpha gives me what I want. The key is a product really helps solving the problems they aimed to solve regardless of open source or cross platform bla bla 🤪
 
badbrain said:
I don't care about open source or not. I only care if it cheap enough to buy a personal licence and good enough to solve the problems. Recently I tried to plot 3D parametric surface equation and guest what? All of the free online graph plotter sucks and only Wolfram Alpha gives me what I want. The key is a product really helps solving the problems they aimed to solve regardless of open source or cross platform bla bla 🤪
Click to expand...

Could maxima with gnuplot solve your graphical problem?
 
guys, you should really try Mathematica, it is great piece of software. To get things done !

there are bad things i could say about it, but, in full honesty, comparing to maxima (which has all my simpathy) it is not fair. It is like comparing the latest iPhone with a $100 Android.
 
sidetone said:
No. That wasn't about anyone here. That was about my personal frustration in real life.
Click to expand...
Tks. I myself should stop acting like that. Didn't research thoroughly, don't do anything but go to this forum (and many other forums) only to rant. It's nothing wrong if people associated me with a troll 😔
 
I think it comes down to whether or not one is prepared to stand behind the wider world consequences of one's actions. Choosing and using software is an action. The whole idea of ethics in business and administration does not appeal to everybody.

My opinion is that the argument that one NEEDS any particular software is not a legitimate one. You don't NEED anything. Everything beyond food and survival basics is optional. You certainly don't need a computer. That's a choice.

I basically take the high road and say a firm NO to everything that does not meet my personal ethics. However, I must say that when it comes to computers, being an amateur has a terrific advantage. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top