Just a question for all Free Software Users from a Student

Thank you very much of your posting. It was interesting to read.

In engineering education I had similar problems what you have. There was only one person besides me in my class who used GNU/Linux. The teachers were not hostile toward Free Software though, and I managed to almost finish the education without touching proprietary software. At the moment I have only the diploma work to do and it is almost ready.

What I did was talked with the teachers about Free Software and asked if I could use Free Software. If there was a course where it was not possible to use Free Software I just skipped it. So, in the end I had tons of ECTS credits and the head teacher of our program said that I should do the mandatory courses in order to get my degree. It would had meant me to grind about 300+ ECTS credits in total (the requirement is 240) and force me to use some proprietary software. Naturally that was no go. So I stopped doing courses and didn't work on my diploma work (which was very stupid of me, I could had graduated years ago without that choise) untill the teacher said that the courses I have taken are all good for engineering degree.

The positives in the story were that in databases course the teacher switched to use MySQL instead of using the lousy Oracle SQL, and now I am doing my diploma work of Free Software.

I agree in that you have a bad school and it would be best to change the school, especially if you can get the credits transferred. Other choises include selecting the courses for your curriculum by yourself and hoping that the school will allow you to make a degree of them. If they are not complete assholes they will accept it if your own course selection makes sense.

Hope this helps and best wishes.

It is a shame that your program / school / professors are not troubled by this.

If they won't accommodate there are other issues with the program that should get them to change the requirements. There is a difference between a tech school and a college level program. In a tech school you will be taught to use particular tools. In a college level program you should be getting taught concepts. Requiring courses titled “visual basic” for instance is a red flag that there is a problem with the program. If a professor is requiring a student to learn a particular tool that is also a problem. Even the language should not be relevant. It should be used merely as conduit for teaching particular concepts.

This is a common problem for students. Most programs fail miserably in one way or another. You'll probably get stuck at some point with a requirement to use a proprietary program regardless of the school you attend.

Before you make any decision to switch schools investigate the schools you are considering. Email the professors, chairperson, and/or an advisor. Find out if the professors or program you will be required to take are also placing any requirements on the tools in which you will use.

After you have investigated your options you'll be more free to place demands. Make them aware of just how serious you consider this issue. Go up the latter too. It will probably cause a back lash although be well worth it should you succeed. I had one professor who was jealous or maybe just irritate at the political actions I took. I had to start going over my work with a fine tooth comb.

You know what might also help is seeking information from religious groups. You might be able to play these cards and force them to accommodate you. Ethics is generally tied to religion. Free software is not a religion although add in a deity and it probably would be.

Is very difficulty to use only free software in others places, but the mostly of times is possible. The mostly of professors recommend many non-free software and the mostly students without critic sense use it.

My cousin started the last month in civil engineering course and have the same problem, but the professor recommended install DevC++(free software but only for Windows). She uses Ubuntu since 2010 with the first computer of her.

I have the privilege to use only free software, fortunately. I'm a graphic designer and use Inkscape, GIMP, Scribus, Blender and I use free software for editing video and audio too, with Audacity, Ardour, Cinelerra, Kdenlive.

Don't give up, insist and show for your professors "this was made with free software" =)

People are surprised when it does wonderful things with free software. The people reaction is "Really? =O"

English isn't my native language too. I speak portuguese. From Brazil.

Heretic! ;D

"There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels."

http://stallman.org/saint.html

Chris made very good points. I had a laptop and I could do stuff on it and show the results to the teachers. They didn't really care what software I used as long as the results were what they wanted. The downside in that is that you have to master the software you use by yourself - the teachers will be very clueless. That is, however, a good thing too since you must find solutions to problems by yourself and be not spoonfed by the teachers.

I would also very strongly suggest you to spend a year as an exhange student. I was a year in Sweden and managed to get credits gained from there to be included in my degree. By becoming an exhange student you should most certainly be able to chose courses you take from the school where you go for your exhange period and use them to "compensate" courses in your home school. Besides that, spending a year as an exchange student can be one of your best years in life. That would however mean that you would lose your friend for the time being.

There should be an office in your school giving you tons of information and encouragement to become an exchange student. There is a website too giving info: http://www.esn.org/

In the end it is good to remember that even though you may be forced to use proprietary software in the school you should not be forced to install proprietary software on your own machines. That is, do what is needed with the school's machines and get your degree quicly and move forward with your life, I would say.

(One corretion to my previous posting: I am working on my bachelor's thesis, not on diploma work. Had to check what is the correct word. Also, in Finland bachelor of engineering requires 240 credits, that is four year of studies. In the rest of the Europe and US I think it is only 180 credits, that is three years. Be happy if you get it with 180 creds!)

IIRC Mono uses libwine to provide a .Net Winforms API.

Wine also provides a DirectX 9 replacement. That is AIUI how some of the proprietary virtualization solutions provide virtual 3D graphics (they hack the Wine source to work with a proprietary interface provided by the virtual machine as opposed to simulating 3D hardware).

Oracle have MySQL in direct competition with Microsoft SQL Server

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/mysql/index.htm

Last I saw of it (over 11 years ago) Microsoft SQL Server was a sorry inadequate beast. Ask your professors if they'll mark the same assignments / class work done in 'Oracle's MySQL.' :-)

Also ask them if they'll accept HTML5 (Canvas etc.), SVG and Javascript instead of Flash for your multimedia. I helped out a local University two or three years ago and their 'experience year' students (i.e. after the first two years of their course) in the same office couldn't do anything in Photoshop I couldn't in GIMP and I'm no GIMP expert.

With all of these things getting a checklist of what you're supposed to learn and be able to demonstrate at the end of the course will help people in the free software community recommend the right free solution for your needs.

I was very shocked and angry when reading how narrow mined your school seems to be. Maybe things are different in France but I suspect you just had exceptional bad luck with the school you've ended up with. I'm in Germany (more precisely, at the KIT) and after the second semester they wouldn't have forced me to use a single proprietary tool yet. Maybe this is just huge luck that I haven't been aware of until now. Many professors here would suggest using tool X which, most of the time, already is free software but wouldn't mind if we'd use a different one if we could achieve the same goal with it. For example, in our software engineering class we were recommended to use Subversion for version control but had the freedom to use any other tool we'd prefer. (Some folks would use Git instead.) Quite understandably, the instructors can't offer help for all tools out there but if you are fine with free software, you will certainly be fine with teaching yourself via RTFM. (Which, by the way, might be quite superior to what is offered in some classes.)

If you could imagine spending a year in Germany, please let me know if I can help you with any organisational stuff. I can't promise that there are no classes here that require using certain tools but at very least, I could find out for you in advance.

I can't really believe you are the only student in your class that is in free software. Do you have any mailing lists for the class attendants? We've had some (technical) discussions about free software on ours. I think using them to ask who would collaborate with you using only free tools would be perfectly legitimate use. (And if it would happen on our list, I'd definitely know at least one person who would reply.)

As you've mentioned yourself, I don't think that just learning a proprietary technology is an entirely bad thing in itself. Quite the contrary, I think a good software engineer should know about as many technologies as possible; even if only to collect arguments against a crappy proprietary tool for the next discussion. Our university offers so-called pools with many computers running all kinds of operating systems. So if I'd like to try something out, I could go there any time without installing the proprietary product on my own machine.

All the best for you and for your freedom!

When I was reading the original post and replies, it only strengthens me in my believe that no only you are struggling with the problems proprietary software brings along, but it also appears that you are caught by "modern" politics. It appears to me that your university, similar to other universities in Europe, is ran like a business rather than a place to really gather understanding and knowledge about the science itself.

The knowledge has declined the past decade from being excellent to mediocre, to say the least, let alone the understanding that they should teach you what computer science is (whether it's bachelor or master doesn't matter), rather than teaching you one or the other software component or language.

I have my own experience with this nonsense, as I was forced to learn Java in a Sybase environment. The only difference was that my teachers where as dissatisfied as I was myself.

I believe the Free Software movement needs to be much stronger in Europe (which is a truly proprietary dominated area).

I hope you will be able to change things mildly, and try to find allies, even if they are so few, to guide you.

> The
> real trouble started with Java, but mostly JavaFX, the final project
> was in JavaFX so I had to use JavaFX SDK with OpenJDK in order to make
> it work (but Oracle now don't have them separate, instead of that it
> is necessary to install Oracle JavaSDK 7 to have access to JavaFX and
> that is a shame).

Studying computer science I had no problems with Java (initially used
Trisquel since it had a good Java IDE without nonfree dependencies,
although I had used Emacs instead of such IDEs for Java programming).
Never used JavaFX; Parabola has OpenJDK 7 available.

> That year passed well, but I am really worried about the next 2 years
> because of those technologies :
> - Adobe Flash (for Multimedia Course)
> - C# with Windows Forms (for Programming Course)
> - DirectX (They start teaching OpenGL 2 years ago, then they switched
> to Ogre and now they are teaching Directx.. Don't know if this will
> change but still).
> - Oracle and Microsoft SQLServer (Don't really know about the licence
> of the first one, but the second one is really bothering me...)
> (And I hope I don't forget any)...

I had used C# on one course (with Mono in Trisquel on a personal
machine, in Ubuntu on university's machines), not planning to do it
again. Used Windows and VMware for two other courses, now I know some
significant technical problems of these that I wouldn't know otherwise
(I knew the ethical problems before, not the VMware business model
making it harder to use). Often could choose between using a nonfree
program and a free alternative (or a fountain pen), avoided one course
using nonfree software before learning that it was very difficult (with
big emphasis on working around bugs in that software or its
documentation). From what I read it's much easier there, although maybe
its theoretical kind of computer science is not what students usually
discuss here.

> I know that alternatives to the software that I listed exist, but they
> won't change soon their ideas, and alone I can't do the difference
> (I've tried believe me... but when everyone even the students are
> against you and you even have difficulties to pay for you
> studies... you don't have a lot of chances..).

You can finish these courses and not recommend these programs in future
(not difficult to do). You will get experience that might be useful
with free software.

(Learning on this forum that elsewhere higher education is usually paid.
In Poland I hear that the only good universities are gratis.)

> What are my rights ? What can I, and what can't I do in order to
> continue studying and learning the same as other without having to use
> those software (at least on my machines). I already failed to one
> discipline because I didn't use a software for UML with the right
> symbols that they wanted. I have courses only based on works done with
> proprietary software (I don't mind to learn, but to be force to use
> them is another thing).

If you keep learning about freedom, you won't see such problems only in
the choice of software. Here you can either find a different school (or
none), or educate others about your beliefs and show them how it helps.
I think both options might be beneficial (and there might be others).

> I just hope that this long and badly wrote text didn't confused you.

It was clear and interesting.

I am a control engineering student in Brazil and have a similar problem. I don't know anybody in my course (save some professors from the computing department, not engineering) that uses free software or free OS's here. I have a course that demands to learn AutoCAD. When I did that I used Ubuntu with wine to run it but since all we did was 2D house architecture and electrical wiring I think LibreCAD would suffice though I did not know it by then.

In the labs everybody uses MatLab. I am learning to use SAGE (free software multi-purpose math software, aiming to be a complete clone of several math tools of various purposes). Hopefully that will suffice but I'm not taking classes that use it this semester.

The real deal, however, is Proteus for circuit simulation. Does anyone knows a viable alternative for it?

I quite like the following two online teaching websites:

Udacity: http://www.udacity.com/
Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/

They've got many university-level courses spanning various disciplines.
It also does not cost anything to participate: no enrolment fees and no
need for external study materials.

While completing those online courses will probably not matter to
current employers as much as a formal degree, I believe that they are
useful anyway. Especially when you'd like to learn something different
to what you are studying or if you are working and would like to expand
your knowledge in a different field. Just don't be like me and do too
many at one time :D.

--
Morne Alberts

There is GNU Octave, Scilab, and Sage which you can use to replace Matlab. With Scilab you can even try to replace Matlab's Simulink. You wont be able to do everything with Scilab what you can do with Simuling, but I am quite sure you can do with Scilab assignments required in the course. The reason is that in that kind of schools you barely scratch the surface of the subject on the course.

I had a cool mathematics teacher. She let me to use my laptop in exam. Thus I used GNU Octave and did not have to touch Matlab. But she was a mathematician, not a Matlab teacher.

For UML there was some gnome program which had the official UML signs. I don't remember the name but you should be able to find it easily by yourself or some other new program.

For CAD I used QtCad or something. The teacher was happy to get the printouts.

For written reports and stuff I used Texinfo xD It was a bit overkill but if there is a single equation on the assignment I rather write it with Texinfo than click graphical editors and look at the butt ugly equations they do.

For Java I used something I don't remember anymore what it was. For C and C++ I used GCC. Worked like a charm.

Pencil and paper is good too like someone mentioned by fountain pen. Not long time ago everything was made with them.

Regarding closing your eyes from the real world by refusing to use proprietary software - I opened my eyes and questioned the need for proprietary software. I saw that I don't have to use it and it is my choise to use it. I chose to not use. I had the freedom, thanks to the people working for that freedom. You might not have it, or do you?