The Digital Landscape - Thoughts One

Some random thoughts on the digital landscape...

I'm currently taking a F/OSS course in my ETEC program. I've seen some very attractive solutions. I've also had PTSD flashbacks. (Richard Stallman reminds me too much of my days in Berkeley, right after the Summer of Love and I believe he really does mean "Free Beer.") 


What I see is very different from the "True Believers." I see a digital environment with a mix of F/OSS and Proprietary software. Open source pushes some of the frontiers and keeps Proprietary makers honest. If you can get something that's nominal cost or free like Zotero that's better at what it does than anything you can buy, why pay?


 Proprietary producers serve to remind the F/OSS community that software has to work for real people who do real work and need tools that they can really use; not exercises in creative coding. I just spent 12 hours trying to get the Ubuntu 12.04 beta to work in a virtual machine. It was painful. No way on earth I'd expect teachers in my school to grapple with this kind of stuff. They don't have time. They have real work to do.