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Allison Parrish @aparrish

between the github/microsoft deal and apple dropping opengl i feel like the future path of non-proprietary foss programming in education and the arts has become much rockier in the past few days

@aparrish wow, I didn't notice they dropped OpenGL. And doing their own thing instead of Vulkan is... okay, pretty normal for Apple.

@aparrish ehhh, I'd argue that both will contribute to a stronger open-source ecosystem in the long term. One by forcing the community to come up with a distributed federated git hosting, the other by pushing more people to not use Apple software. 🤞

@petko I agree with this, I'm just thinking of, like, my next five years of making lesson plans and making things myself and how intense the temptation will be to just use the proprietary tools

@aparrish
maybe

our societies are fracturing on so many levels

currently, there is a pretty strong open source culture (mastodon)
and yet nothing lasts forever

maybe it will be apple and microsoft who are the ones left on the rocks ...

@aparrish
we should never expect freedom from apple. its ecosystem is totally a walled garden, even microsoft is doing better.

@aparrish GitLab (100x the features of GH and open source itself) & gitea (lightweight, also OSS) can help! You can also single-click import your GH repos into GL.

the opengl thing is just super sad.

@vickysteeves @aparrish #Gitea runs like a dream! and it imported my GH repos in an instant (each, individually) :technologist_g1:

@vickysteeves that helps on an individual level going forward, but (e.g.) my department has already made significant investments in github in terms of hosted internal projects, student tutorials and culture, curriculum, etc. the temptation to just continue with what's already built will be overwhelming

@vickysteeves no (well I'm not at least and I haven't heard of others here using it). is it any good?

@aparrish I'm not sure, just wondering if that's what you were using for curriculum -- I know a few departments on campus are.

@vickysteeves no, I mean, literally teaching students how to use github is part of the curriculum

@aparrish this is actually good news. Sorry to rejoice, but the choice of FOSS for education is so evident in my mind. I recognise that the burden will again be put on the teachers to adapt and deal with student frustrations and bias. But its time the marriage of proprietary tech and education breaks apart.

@xuv it's evident in my mind too. there's just a lot of potentially frustrating work ahead to make it happen (technical, cultural, institutional)