Monthly Archives: July 2007

Software and Social Justice Revisited

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Several months ago, I posted something about Eben Moglen’s talk on free software and social justice. In it, he goes through how software will control the 21st century and how free software will enable us, the people, to achieve social justice and freedom without the need for violent upheaval.

The guest speaker at CCF was talking about social justice, and it was a very good talk. One of the questions that was asked of him was, what do we do? His answer: right now, we can’t do anything, except to work hard through school and get into a position where you can do something.

Something I’ve always tried to do is to connect everything I do back to my faith. Whether it’s design, math, or programming, there will always be some way to connect what we do with God. And why not? After all, he did make it so that ??¬? can never be true and that ?f?df(x)dx=f(x).

And so I’m always trying to find out what God would have me do with the skills and interests he’s placed in me. How does typography further the kingdom? How do web standards advance the kingdom? How do recursive descent parsers expand the kingdom?

So the obvious thing is to use your gifts at church. And obviously, that’s too easy. It’s great for discovering and developing your gifts, but Jesus called us to the ends of the earth. The extent of our talents should not be the church.

So what other ways are there to excercise your skills? Christ called us to go out and serve the weak, the needy, the broken, and in doing so, show them the love of Christ. The problem is that there’s so much to do. The hungry, the sick, the oppressed, it’s impossible to serve all of them especially with our finite skillsets.

I am studying software engineering. Presumably, I’m going to go on to become a software developer and come up with some hot algorithms to parse some hot language. But how does software accomplish the Great Commission? And that’s when I read and listened to Eben Moglen’s “Software and Community in the Early 21st Century”. Afterwards, what I had to do was made much clearer.

Below, is the transcript from the talk; thanks to Geof Glass who transcribed it.

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Ontario crits math for 30000

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So this morning I found out that Ontario decided to play around with Grade 12 math again. On the bright side, they did not go ahead with their insane plan to stab calculus in a vital organ. Unfortunately, it went for the face instead.

Long ago, in OAC, there were three ultra math courses: Algebra and Geometry, Calculus, and Finite Mathematics. All three were the pinnacle of math in high school. Then, a few years ago, the government obliterated OAC and redid the entire school system, and the three math courses we ended up did not strike fear into hearts as the ones before them did. We now had Advanced Functions and Introductory Calculus, Data Management, and Geometry and Discrete Mathematics.

With this setup, we got vectors, differential calculus, and combinatorics, which was pretty cool. We also got profs crying for the first three months because we couldn’t integrate until then.

Now, the new setup is as follows: Advanced Functions, Calculus and Vectors, Data Management. Advanced Functions seems to be the part of calc that wasn’t differential calculus. Data looks relatively unchanged. And we have calc and vectors.

The biggest changes are with calc. Essentially, they’ve destroyed the most interesting math course in high school by taking out combinatorics. After they did that, they realized they had enough room to stretch out half a course into its own course. And then, they took differential calc and stuck it with vectors.

I’ll admit that vectors and combinatorics really have nothing to do with each other and really the only reason why they were together before was that they were both sufficiently interesting and really, only math and engineering majors would need vectors and combinatorics. That and those two topics seemed to tie in proofs quite nicely.

But calc and vectors? I honestly don’t see how this will help the situation if the government is after lower failure rates, which it clearly is all its concerned about in light of these changes. Considering that most science and business people will likely need calc at least for analysis, throwing vectors in there essentially screws them over. And if the vectors weren’t deadly enough, the proofing will finish the job.

That is unless I am mistaken and the math courses really got owned and they took out proofs, which will crush any future prospective math majors.

So, ultimately, who will get destroyed by this turn of events?

  • Non-semestered students – they have the privilege of taking a prerequisite course at the same time as their introductory calculus course! Because differentiating exponential functions while you’re being introduced to them is the best way to learn!
  • Arts majors – have fun watching your average plummet.
  • Science majors – you’ll be ahead of the artsies in vectors, but proofing will still crush you.
  • Math majors – have fun trying to abstract things when all the math you’ve done in your life has been algebra.
  • Engineers – have fun when you realize that the prof just went through three courses in two weeks.

Copyright and Community

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Yesterday, I had the opportunity to go hear Richard Stallman speak. The Computer Science Club at Waterloo managed to snag him and gave his speech entitled “Copyright and Community in the Age of Computer Networks.”

Stallman’s arguments about copyright are essentially the same as Lessig’s from his talk, “Free Culture.” That is, copyright started out as a restriction on publishers but now has grown into something that denies the freedom of the public. The media corporations are now excercising their influence on our governments to continue to extend the breadth of copyright so that they are in control of our culture.

Because his points mirror Lessig’s so closely, I kind of wish he did give a talk about Free Software instead, since it’s so relevant to those of us hoping to become developers at Waterloo. And while he kept emphasising that this wasn’t a Free Software talk, he inevitably had to talk about it.

There were a few interesting points that he brought up during the talk. The first was about GNU/Linux. We’ve all heard the argument before that Linux really shouldn’t be called Linux because it isn’t just Linux. It’s something that I’ve never really thought about, but I knew in the back of my mind. The two reasons are that Linus Torvalds isn’t a free software person and that the GNU portion of the OS has been worked on for almost a decade.

It makes sense that Torvalds wouldn’t really be part of the free software movement, considering he mentioned that he used whatever was right for the task, and so open sourcing the Linux kernel was the most efficient way of working on it. This lead people to believe that Torvalds was all for free software, where this isn’t really the case. I’ve never really thought about how dangerous it would be until Stallman mentioned it.

I’d also knew that GNU had existed long before Linux and that we were all diminishing the work that GNU has done by thinking of the OS only as Linux the kernel. Stallman believes that properly crediting the work that GNU has done will take some of the limelight off of Torvalds so that GNU will be able to talk about free software with more authority.

There’s also the idea that copyright was put in place since it affected only industry. Since in the 1700s, the only people who were capable of mass production of copies was industry, it didn’t hurt to restrict them, and so the law wasn’t enforced against the general public. Today, however, we all own copying machines: computers. And as a democratic state, the right thing to do should be to diminish the powers that copyright grants.

Stallman also addressed in the Q&A how programmers are expected to live off of free software. Essentially, proprietary software restricts and oppresses the user. To create proprietary software is essentially taking away the freedom of others, and that’s unacceptable. However, most paid programming is for custom software for companies anyway, so that will remain largely unchanged.