[TOS] Why do you care about TOS?

Shlomi Fish shlomif at iglu.org.il
Thu Apr 15 14:58:03 UTC 2010


On Wednesday 14 Apr 2010 10:44:04 Mel Chua wrote:
> I saw this today and was reminded of why it's important to do what we're
> doing - or at least what motivates me to work on it.
> 
> http://geekfeminism.org/2010/04/09/is-requiring-open-source-experience-sexi
> st/#comments
> 
> The comments on this post are long, but worth reading. For me, this is
> one of the big reasons I'd love to see FOSS contribution taught in
> schools, as an attractive option for fulfilling one's academic
> requirements, as opposed to only being available "in one's free time,"
> which for students with family, financial, etc. constraints may not exist.
> 

Well, the problem with this approach is that it often matters how it's taught. 
For example, I overheard a conversation where people said that some Israeli 
schools now teach role playing games in school, and someone said one of the 
girls in her family grew to hate them because she had an awful teacher. 
Furthermore, I was told Japan suffers from one of the highest suicide rates 
among 1st graders because the grades that they receive there are taken into 
account in acceptance to university and they have a lot of pressure.

I don't want to discourage Teaching Open Source or other efforts, but we 
should consider whether forcing young people to get involve in FOSS 
development against their will would be beneficial in the long run.

> I sometimes tell people I wouldn't have gotten into open source if I
> hadn't left home for high school (I attended the residential public
> magnet high school school for my state). The long stretches of
> uninterrupted time I had in my dorm room to be exposed to people who
> were into Linux (and supportive of me playing with the same), become
> fascinated with code, tinker with Debian, etc. were only present when I
> was living at school - during summers and vacations, my learning crawled
> to a standstill as I was interrupted to wash dishes, watch kids, chided
> for spending too much time on the computer talking to people my family
> didn't know instead of being on-call to help out around the house, and
> so forth. If I hadn't been able to "catch the bug" while I was in
> school, I wouldn't have the energy to fight to preserve my ability to
> learn about and contribute to these things later on in life (like now).
> 

Hmmmm... I can understand your point of view, but my experience during high 
school was the opposite, though I can only try to relate. Naturally, when I 
started computing (at 1987 - I was born in 1977), the FOSS movement was not as 
prevalent on personal computers as it is today, we didn't have access to the 
Internet, and most of us were not made aware of the FOSS ideology and its 
benefits (insert reference to the 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Yorkshiremen_sketch here).  

> For some people, school is the best place to get prolonged, consistent
> exposure to opportunities for FOSS contribution, which can lead directly
> to more opportunities down the line. (It worked for me!) One of the
> results of what we're doing at TOS is opening up these opportunities to
> those who may currently not be able (or easily able) to pay the
> invisible "privilege tax" required to gain access. There are many more
> good things that come from teaching open source - but this is one that
> I've found often overlooked, and the primary reason I continue to
> contribute in this space.
> 

Well, my thoughts about it is that as was witnessed in Israel after the burst 
of the bubble (see:
http://www.whatsup.org.il/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2073&mode=nested&order=0&thold=0
) most programmers would rather do nothing of significance while being 
unemployed instead of contributing to open-source software. This is because we 
didn't witness any significant increase in the number of Israeli programmers 
who started contributing to open-source after the burst of the bubble, and the 
most plausible cause seemed to have been that most programmers didn't like to 
program for fun. Maybe this attitude has changed somewhat in recent years, 
though. 

In any case, I've been contributing to open source in various ways throughout 
my unemployment (which has been lasting for a many years now with limited 
interruptions) and it has been bringing meaning to my life, helped me a little 
financially (still not enough, but I hope it will change), got me some leads  
for jobs and projects, and is naturally fun and makes me happy.

My target audience in the tutorial on the wiki was primarily those people (of 
any age) who have enough free time to work on open-source and I don't intend 
it to become course material for universities or high schools (not that I see 
anything wrong with the TOS book's approach). 

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

> </soapbox>
> 
> Why are *you* here?
> 
> --Mel
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