<!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
<!-- Parent-Version: 1.96 -->
<!-- This page is derived from /server/standards/boilerplate.html -->
<!--#set var="DISABLE_TOP_ADDENDUM" value="yes" -->
<title>Resisting proprietary software
- GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/side-menu.css" media="screen" />
<!--#include virtual="/education/po/resisting-proprietary-software.translist" -->
<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
<div class="nav">
<a id="side-menu-button" class="switch" href="#navlinks">
<img id="side-menu-icon" height="32"
src="/graphics/icons/side-menu.png"
title="Education Contents"
alt=" [Education Contents] " />
</a>
<p class="breadcrumb">
<a href="/"><img src="/graphics/icons/home.png" height="24"
alt="GNU Home" title="GNU Home" /></a> /
<a href="/education/education.html">Education</a> /</p>
</div>
<!--GNUN: OUT-OF-DATE NOTICE-->
<!--#include virtual="/server/top-addendum.html" -->
<div style="clear: both"></div>
<div id="last-div" class="reduced-width">
<h2>Resisting Proprietary Software</h2>
<div class="article">
<p>Teachers, students, parents, free software advocates and the
community at large are taking action to stop the use of nonfree
programs in schools. They are doing it by telling schools about
<a
href="/philosophy/free-sw.html">free software</a> and raising
awareness of the dangers nonfree programs pose to students' computer
freedom and privacy. They are objecting persistently to the nonfree
software that the schools suggest to them.</p>
<p>The recent health emergency situation caused by COVID-19
presented a new challenge. Traditional in-person classes were
suddenly disallowed, and overnight thousands of schools around
the world were confronted with a decision to make: either
suspend their teaching activities entirely or comply by switching
to online classes.</p>
<p>Schools from areas of the world where Internet connection and
access to technology is readily available decided to go online.
Unfortunately, most school administrators and teachers had never
heard about free software, so they couldn't think of anything but
whatever they knew or had already used—namely, freedom-denying
programs for video conferencing and online communication such as
Zoom and Skype, among others.</p>
<p>It's no secret, however, that the
<a href="https://www.eff.org/issues/student-privacy">
companies that distribute these programs use them to collect
personal data to profile their users</a><a href="#cloud">(1)</a>.
These data, in turn, can be seized by the State. It is the moral
responsibility of schools to protect their students from being
spied on, but if the school fails to do so, students and their
parents should object and not let it happen.</p>
<p>More generally, <a
href="/education/edu-schools.html">schools should reject
all proprietary software</a> for a number of <a
href="/education/edu-why.html">reasons</a>.</p>
<p>The free software community responded by offering <a
href="/software/free-software-for-education.html#conferencing">
communication and videoconferencing programs programs</a> that respect
freedom and privacy, because staying away from health
hazards is a duty, as it is to stay safe from nonfree
software.</p>
<p>Learn about the <a
href="/education/dangers-of-proprietary-systems-in-online-teaching.html">
dangers of proprietary systems in online teaching</a> and see
examples of how people are <a
href="/education/successful-resistance-against-nonfree-software.html">
successfully resisting nonfree software</a>.</p>
<div class="column-limit"></div>
</div>
<h3 class="footnote">Footnote</h3>
<ol>
<li id="cloud">The article cited uses the word “cloud”
to refer to computing done on servers owned by third parties.
The term is too broad, it generalizes about various uses of
servers that are totally different from a moral point of view.
See more about why <a
href="/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#CloudComputing">
the GNU Project strongly recommends not to use the term
“cloud”</a>.</li>
</ol>
</div>
<!--#include virtual="/education/education-menu.html" -->
<!--#include virtual="/server/footer.html" -->
<div id="footer" role="contentinfo">
<div class="unprintable">
<p>Please send general FSF & GNU inquiries to
<a href="mailto:gnu@gnu.org"><gnu@gnu.org></a>.
There are also <a href="/contact/">other ways to contact</a>
the FSF. Broken links and other corrections or suggestions can be sent
to <a href="mailto:webmasters@gnu.org"><webmasters@gnu.org></a>.</p>
<p><!-- TRANSLATORS: Ignore the original text in this paragraph,
replace it with the translation of these two:
We work hard and do our best to provide accurate, good quality
translations. However, we are not exempt from imperfection.
Please send your comments and general suggestions in this regard
to <a href="mailto:web-translators@gnu.org">
<web-translators@gnu.org></a>.</p>
<p>For information on coordinating and contributing translations of
our web pages, see <a
href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
README</a>. -->
Please see the <a
href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
README</a> for information on coordinating and contributing translations
of this article.</p>
</div>
<!-- Regarding copyright, in general, standalone pages (as opposed to
files generated as part of manuals) on the GNU web server should
be under CC BY-ND 4.0. Please do NOT change or remove this
without talking with the webmasters or licensing team first.
Please make sure the copyright date is consistent with the
document. For web pages, it is ok to list just the latest year the
document was modified, or published.
If you wish to list earlier years, that is ok too.
Either "2001, 2002, 2003" or "2001-2003" are ok for specifying
years, as long as each year in the range is in fact a copyrightable
year, i.e., a year in which the document was published (including
being publicly visible on the web or in a revision control system).
There is more detail about copyright years in the GNU Maintainers
Information document, www.gnu.org/prep/maintain. -->
<p>Copyright © 2020, 2021 2021, 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.</p>
<p>This page is licensed under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative
Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.</p>
<!--#include virtual="/server/bottom-notes.html" -->
<p class="unprintable">Updated:
<!-- timestamp start -->
$Date: 2022/06/09 17:30:09 $
<!-- timestamp end -->
</p>
</div>
</div><!-- for class="inner", starts in the banner include -->
</body>
</html>