Libre Software Advocacy
as an Education Problem

Speaker:	Chao-Kuei "no .doc" Hung
Affiliation:	Chaoyang University, Taiwan Software Liberty Association, Taiwan (SLAT) Organization for Free Software in Education and Teaching (OFSET)
URL:	http://www.cyut.edu.tw/~ckhung/

Background

1. Personal: I teach in a CS-related department in a University.
2. National:
   1. Schools create and teach creating documents/web pages in proprietary formats with Microsoft's tools.
   2. Our past success in selling hardware contributes further to strong business tie with Microsoft.
   3. Taiwan government's narrow focus on FLOSS is mainly FLOSS's commodity value.
3. Audience: Assmue that the audience already appreciate FLOSS, and wish to spread it in schools, but face strong resistence from the general public.

Main Thesis

1. FLOSS is more than a technology. It is about the society.
2. To convince the general public, it is helpful to emphasize some non-technical advantages.
3. To convince technical people, it is still helpful to emphasize some other non-technical advantages.
4. Analogies and metaphors help
5. These non-technical ideas need be integrated into the education system.

Therefore I will flash quickly the pictures and ideas I often use in speeches to the general public, not to convince the audience (because you are already convinced :-) but to share my experience of how to convince people.

Uniting the Community

... before going to preach the virtues of FLOSS to the general public.

1. Why do you prefer color TV to black-and-white TV?
   1. A. Because it has the Red color. (freedom)
   2. B. Because it has the Green color. (fun)
   3. C. Because it has the Blue color. (quality)
   4. D. All of the above.
2. (Almost) one category of software, two different (major) names, many reasons to enjoy.
3. No need to be afraid of mentioning freedom; No need to be ashamed of mentioning open source.
4. Community is small. Let's not divide ourselves.

Techies: Beware of your Learning Investment

1. How many words of your second/third language do you know?
   How many syntactically correct sentences can you make?
   Why not learn a GUI to help you write?
   
   
   Warning: main(../../a/combination.shtml): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /usr0/teacher/im/ckhung/public_html/s/adv.en/content.php on line 154
   
   Warning: main(): Failed opening '../../a/combination.shtml' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/local/php4/lib/php') in /usr0/teacher/im/ckhung/public_html/s/adv.en/content.php on line 154
   
2. Important elements of learning in math and foreign languages:
   1. memorizing few build blocks that last as long as centuries (longeivity criterion)
   2. the ability to decompose/analyze (combinability criterion)
   3. the ability to combine/synthesize (combinability criterion)

Learn Things that Encourage Combination

1. Why not emphasize the same criteria -- longevity and combine-ability for IT education (ITRE 2005) for the general public? regexp, CLI, pipe and backquote, html tags, ex1, ex2, ex3, ...
2. Benefits: longer life span of your knowledge and combinatorial explosion of its use.
3. Price: more challenging. But then learning math/languages is the same.
4. A plea to the LPI people: put more emphasis on the combinatorial aspect than the memorizing aspect of CLI.

Consumers: Beware of your Right

1. Software should be decomposable into components.
2. It is important not only to techies, but also to the public.
3. But some vendors don't like it.

Details: Social Considerations in Choosing Digital Archiving Technologies, (ICDAT 2005)

Opiumware

1. "We are sorry, your call cannot be completed because the other party uses a different phone model"
2. Opiumware: requiring sameness exactly indicates lack of compatibility
3. The public need to know that distributing .doc files is not merely a technical issue. It is an ethical issue.

Consumers: How to Protect Your Longer Term Interest?

Still insist on following the largest brand exclusively? Think again. What happens if you do the same with home theater/AV systems?

Tower of Babel

Construction tools at one hand, anti-social laws and practices restricting communications/time-/space-shifting information at the other hand, do we want to build or destroy our digital tower of babel? (With software patents, UCITA, 1201 anti-circumvention of DMCA, etc, we don't need God's help to destroy the tower.)

So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth. "Tower of Babel" Genesis 11:1-9

Distinguish Open Interface and Open Source

1. Three levels of software freedom: open source, proprietary with open interface, opiumware
2. A plea to the community: Define open interface.

OSS	hard to enforce	attacked by FUD	(some of) public sympathize vendors
OI	easy to enforce	hard to attack	public on our side

We still advocate FLOSS; Let consumer right org. advocate OI and push governments to enforce OI.

Show Them the Diff, not just the Comm!

(With all due respect to projects such as OO.o and Mozilla) Let's emphasize what proprietary software can't do but FLOSS can:

1. Live CD's such as knoppix and freeduc-cd, and live usb key
2. Autoraise and auto-switch of desktops
3. DrGeo (show it not only to teachers, but also to parents)
4. ... (Please tell us your favorite)

Idea: Install Freeduc-cd Terminals in Libraries

1. Put computers in school libraries.
2. Remove harddisk and boot freeduc-cd to reduce management cost.
3. Give short courses on 1 or 2 applications such as drgeo and gcomrpis, and let the kids explore the rest on their own.
4. Provide a servie to burn FS cdrw's.

Benefits:

1. No existing competition from the other operating system, less resistence from the administration and public.
2. Emphasize the rapid update cycles of FS and no need to keep old versions on many cdroms.
3. Promote environment preservation at the same time.

Disillusioning the Unbelievers

Resistence is futile:

    closed-minded thinking:

    consumer pop. = old tech. + new tech.
     ________________________
    [      old     /   new   ]
    [______________\_________]

    consumer pop. is constant.
    new tech grows ==> old tech suffers

     _
    /o\      open-minded thinking:
    |l|
    |d|      
    |_|
    /n\      consumer sat. = new tech. + old tech.
    |e|      old tech is constant.
    |w|      new tech grows ==> consumer sat. grows
    ---     

1. Does one resist the industrial revolution because his job is threatened, or does one find a new niche in the new ecology?
2. Commodity value of Copyfire?

Conclusions

1. Motivate different audience with different benefits of FLOSS. It is colorful. There must be some hue that appeals to this particular audience.
2. Public awareness is the key. So the success of advocacy lies in education (on many less-technical issues) for the public (not just for the technical people).
3. So we need many analogies and simple drawings.
4. We also need to distinguish between OI and FLOSS, and get people who don't necessarily agree with FLOSS to fight against proprietary interfaces along with us.
5. Then we will compete fairly with proprietary software whose interface is open (middle part in the spectrum of freedom). In that, I am certain that we will succeed more easily ;-)