Dear Crista, Let us separate two concerns: Your own freedom and your support of others' freedom.
I suspect you can largely maintain your own software freedom at work. I personally don't mind using proprietary software for work, provided that I don't make a remarkable effort to learn the software, that it run on a dedicated computer and, of course, that I get paid enough. As for contributions to other peoples' freedoms, I think it would be very helpful if you simply talked about freedom to user useRs outside of work. At present I tend to be the only one in any large room of useRs to voice such concerns. Also, if you come up with an interesting software idea, I suspect it will be more useful to release it to the public rather than to work. If it is going to be very useful, it will likely still be useful in many years, so you can wait to create it until you retire or get fired. I think the choice of option 1 versus option 2 has little direct impact on your freedom and on the freedoms of others, as it seems you will have little effect on your workplace regardless of the option. This is partly because it seems you have little power in your hierarchical workplace. I suggest going with option 1 because I think it will make your work easier. In order to maintain your own freedom, instead of convincing others to use free software, simply use it yourself. You can't avoid running the proprietary software, but you can avoid learning it, and you can also avoid using any work resources for non-work activity. Also, part of your job is necessarily to read and understand the licenses of the software you are using. Since proprietary licensing is much varied compared to free software licensing, this can take a long time, and you should expect your employer to give you that time, even if it delays whatever project you are going to use the software for. As for your specific software issues, Would it be okay to produce research posters in Beamer, convert them with Inkscape to a high-resolution raster image, and then copy that to PowerPoint? Or maybe you can use a vector format, so it would look like you really made it in PowerPoint. It won't be okay if you ask for permission, of course, but if you didn't, would anyone notice? You can write up research reports in LaTeX but render the result to Word. Again, don't say you're doing this, but would it work? Use git but don't tell anyone you're using it. Nobody needs to know. I think you can install git without administrator rights on windows, and it comes with bash. You certainly can install fossil, since fossil is a single executable. Since your use of free software probably makes you especially productive, I suggest additionally that you not tell anyone at work about how you use free software at work to make your job easier. It is important also that you pretend your work takes you almost as long as it would take anyone else. I find that non-hackers appreciate hard work, so it is better if your work seems difficult. In case you do choose to go with option 2, I suggest asking on r-help in some other R forum, as this is a common concern among useRs. Note that many useRs these days are oblivious to the software freedom considerations and to R's status as a GNU project, so many are likely not to understand some of your concerns. I was very frustrated that UseR! 2020 was announced by email only after the submission deadline. If anyone submitted, I have to imagine it was announced by other means beforehand. I suggested r-help because I find that those useRs who care about freedom tend to prefer email and official R foundation venues over other R discussion forums. You might try asking rOpenSci collaborators, but many of them eschew freedom in favor of supposed benefits of GitHub, RStudio, and Twitter. Since the RStudio IDE is free software, I elaborate on my concerns about RStudio. Indeed, some of RStudio's products are proprietary, but the bigger issue for me is the expectation that its users and contributors run other proprietary software. For example, patches are often accepted by GitHub only. Also, while the licensing of contributed packages is generally free, lock-in is often created by the complexity of dependencies, which I tend to have trouble installing on free operating systems. I imagine they work just fine on Mac and Ubuntu. I apply option 1 in the workplace. I maintain my own freedoms by keeping work and life very separate. I have a very proprietary computer provided by the company, but I use it and only it for work. If I am to do anything complicated, I prefer to do it in free software, because I don't want to waste time learning proprietary software. It happens that I generally already know how to do whatever I want to do with free software; because it is free, I have been studying it most of my life, so I already know it very well. When I was requested to install apps on my phone, I first responded in confusion because I had not been issued a phone. Then when I learned that I was expected to have my own mobile phone, I explained that my mobile phone didn't have apps, so I received a hardware two-factor authentication token. Lately there have been instructions to join Gloom meetings. I join these by phone, without creating an account. I was recently instructed to install the Klaxoon "app" but was not explicitly told to do it on a non-work computer, so I initiated a process to get it installed on a work computer. This involved requesting an exception to the firewall. I am intrigued that the company considers these softwares unsafe to run on company computers but acceptable to run on other computers. When I find a convenient opportunity, I will bring up the concerns that our Chief GNUsance has been preparing. http://www.stallman.org/zoom.html There are some software choices as well. I expect information to be exchanged in Microsoft file formats, but I mostly modify them with free software. My colleagues mostly don't know about version control. If they know about it, they know only GitHub, not git, and they don't really know how to use it. So I don't tell my colleagues that I use version control. I personally use fossil, but git's good too. I eventually did get administrator rights to my work computer, but before that, I noticed that some things were configured better on RStudio than on normal R, particularly the packages that are developed by RStudio; they don't seem to care to support non-RStudio editors. Anyway, the point is that I previously did not manage to install LaTex, so I made do with markdown, and the Word output format was working in RStudio, so I copied the configuration from there. Now that I have administrator rights, I can install Cygwin, which makes things sooooooooooo much easier and also faster. If I think I will have this job for a while, maybe I will try setting up a free operating system in a virtual machine. All of this is may seem like lot of pointless trouble, and that is because it is work. If it were easy, people would feel like they did not deserve their compensation. I personally would rather not work, but I still put up with it in exchange for money. I do something sort of like option 2 as well. When I am around other useRs, I agitate aggressively for free software. I don't meet other useRs at work. Around other useRs I also agitate about my view that the contemporary ubiquitous interest in statistics is in fact a religion that worships novel statistics as a diety that will save humanity. I believe that proprietary licensing contributes to the sensation of novelty that is part of the faith. In my current work, for example, we overfit models in order to prove relationships random noise, and my employer considers the resulting fitted models to be proprietary information. The norm is to have faith in data is seen as the source of all truth, and this exercise is a ritual that blesses our particular project. In some cases it is important that the relationship match other beliefs, but usually all that matters is that data be involved somehow. I believe that the principle of freedom of religion gives us the choice whether to believe in this diety of proprietary data stored on other people's computers. However, I consider that the norms are tending to the removal of this freedom, to a situation where one must accept the faith in nebulous data in order to be employed. Competent useRs tend to like hearing my view of statistics as a new religion. Maybe I should relate that to software licensing in order to promote awareness of the benefits of free software. Anyway, this is getting me thinking, maybe it would be interesting to prepare materials for useRs on the topic of software freedom. While it seems hoarders have managed to promote proprietary software among useRs over the past few years, I believe there is still much respect of free software among useRs because of its R's academic tradition. I think this is especially strong among those who began using R before RStudio. That is to say, rather than trying to promote free software in your workplace, I think it could be more interesting to promote free software among useRs. I respectfully remain your servant, Fischers Fritz _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
