Computer Science Education Benefits from FLOSS

I read with interest today when Linux Weekly News linked to Greg DeKoenigsberg's response to Mark Guzdial's ACM Blog post, The Impact of Open Source on Computing Education (which is mostly a summary of his primary argument on his personal blog). I must sadly admit that I was not terribly surprised to read such a post from an ACM-affiliated academic that speaks so negatively of FLOSS's contribution to Computer Science education.

I mostly agree with (and won't repeat) DeKoenigsberg's arguments, but I do have some additional points and anecdotal examples that may add usefully to the debate. I have been both a student (high school, graduate and undergraduate) and teacher (high school and TA) of Computer Science. In both cases, software freedom was fundamental and frankly downright essential to my education and to that of my students.

Before I outline my copious disagreements, though, I want to make abundantly clear that I agree with one of Guzdial's primary three points: there is too much unfriendly and outright sexist (although Guzdial does not use that word directly) behavior in the FLOSS community. This should not be ignored, and needs active attention. Guzdial, however, is clearly underinformed about the extensive work that many of us are doing to raise awareness and address that issue. In software development terms: it's a known bug, it's been triaged, and development on a fix is in progress. And, in true FLOSS fashion, patches are welcome, too (i.e., get involved in a FLOSS community and help address the problem).

However, the place where my disagreement with Guzdial begins is that this sexism problem is unique to FLOSS. As an undergraduate Computer Science major, it was quite clear to me that a sexist culture was prevalent in my Computer Science department and in CS in general. This had nothing to do with FLOSS culture, since there was no FLOSS in my undergraduate department until I installed a few GNU/Linux machines. (See below for details.)

Computer Science as a whole unfortunately remains heavily male-dominated with problematic sexist overtones. It was common when I was an undergraduate (in the early 1990s) that some of my fellow male students would display pornography on the workstation screens without a care about who felt unwelcome because of it. Many women complained that they didn't feel comfortable in the computer lab, and the issue became a complicated and ongoing debate in our department. (We all frankly could have used remedial sensitivity training!) In graduate school, a CS professor said to me (completely straight-faced) that women didn't major in Computer Science because most women's long term goals are to have babies and keep house. Thus, I simply reject the notion that this sexism and lack of acceptance of diversity is a problem unique to FLOSS culture: it's a CS-wide problem, AFAICT. Indeed, the CRA's Taulbee Survey shows (see PDF page 10) that only 22% of the tenure track CS faculty in the USA and Canada are women, and only 12% of the full professors are. In short, Guzdial's corner of the computing world shares this problem with mine.

Guzdial's second point is the most offensive to the FLOSS community. He argues that volunteerism in FLOSS sends a message that no good jobs are available in computing. I admit that I have only anecdotal evidence to go on (of course, Guzdial quotes no statistical data, either), but in my experience, I know that I and many others in FLOSS have been successfully and gainfully employed precisely because of past volunteer work we've done. Ted T'so is fond of saying: Thanks to Linux, my hobby became my job and my job became my hobby. My experience, while neither as profound nor as important as Ted's, is somewhat similar.

I downloaded a copy of GNU/Linux for the first time in 1992. I showed it to my undergraduate fa