Stormy, Having had the honor of hosting Richard for an invited speech at RPI on January last year (outside the framework of our course). I feel obliged to reply to your question.
In the particular case of our course at RPI, the content of the class: http://public.kitware.com/OpenSourceSoftwarePractice/index.php/Fall2009/Course_notes can certainly fit the description of Free Software as well as Open Source software. In retrospective, the class should have been named "Free and Open Source Software Practices" as opposed to just: "Open Source Software Practices". We put a lot of emphasis on educating about copyright, patents, trademarks, and licensing, as well as on social implications of FOSS, such as Open Access and Open Culture. The case studies that we present combine both free software communities and open source ones. It is true, however that we don't make enough emphasis of some of the topics that the FSF champions, in particular: Freedom and the Rights to Free Speech and Privacy. We could certainly introduce more material on these topics. Yesterday, while teaching the lecture on "Software Patents", http://public.kitware.com/OpenSourceSoftwarePractice/index.php/Fall2009/Course_notes#Lecture_19_-_Software_Patents_.28Luis_Ibanez.29 I was pointing out to the students that the only two organizations that will take at heart the difficult challenge of eliminating "Software Patents" are: the FSF and the EFF, and some portions of the lecture were based on Eben Moglen's talk: http://public.kitware.com/OpenSourceSoftwarePractice/index.php/Fall2009/Patents_Additional_Material#Eben_Moglen_-_Patents_at_a_Crossroads:_Bilski_and_Beyond but... again... a more specific coverage of the topics of Freedom and Privacy should be introduced in the syllabus. We discussed the differences between Free Software and Open Source Software only in one of the lectures, early on in the class. I must confess, also, that in the lectures on licensing we don't discuss the GPL and LGPL licenses in depth. The honest reason: I don't feel qualified to do it properly. (particularly for GPLv3) One thing is to have an informal discussion on GPL and a very different one is to give a lecture on it. That's one of the topics in which I certainly don't want to give a poor lecture and for which the best option will be to have an invited FSF speaker, to make sure that students get the best education on the license terms, implications and rationale. Specially by including a long Q & A session. To put this in context: what we have seen in our class is that in a group of ~25 students, you see ~20 who have very nebulous notions of what FOSS is, ~3 who are well informed, and 2 who know *a lot* more than the instructor. (and these last 2 may be different people from topic to topic). This distribution keep us humble and force us to make sure that the material in the lectures is well prepared. In the same class we had about 6 students who have never used the command line, (mostly because RPI provides only proprietary software to first year students, and they are trapped from then on), sitting along with a Fedora packager, a Gentoo developer and a Gnome developer... --- As an a Footnote: We couldn't have Richard as invited speaker in the course itself due to the biased name of the course, ("Open Source") so we found out a date that worked for him after the course finished. The talk was very well attended (about ~200 people), and it made a big impression in the students. The video recording is available here: http://www.rpitv.org/productions/2009/01/22/Richard-Stallman-Lecture --- To summarize: A) We should be more careful when labeling / naming the courses and their content. B) We certainly can use help from members of the Free Software community to cover topics that we are not well prepared to teach. Luis ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2009/12/1 Stormy Peters <sto...@gnome.org>: > I mentioned TOS in my last weekly update and Richard Stallman asked if > people in this group are teaching the concepts of free software as well as > the open source model? (Free software, the movement and the ideals as > opposed to open source software.) > > Since many of the materials I've seen include a history that usually > mentions Richard, I'm thinking many of you do ... but I'd like to put the > question out there and introduce Richard to the group. > > I'm also sure that if people are interested in covering it in your classes, > we could find guest speakers from the community as well. > > Stormy > > _______________________________________________ > tos mailing list > tos@teachingopensource.org > http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos > > _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
