School
From ADFA: Audenshaw Digital Freedom Association
The school already respects Digital Freedom to a certain extent, for example if uses various freedomware applications - but it could be better, and are working towards having more free systems.
Contents |
[edit] Digital Free Speech
It could be argued that the school is restricting Freedom of Speech by blocking sites using the blacklist. However, we as a group do not feel this is an important thing to fight against. The blacklist serves a valid purpose, and all the controversial sites like wikipedia and wikileaks are available.
Also, SSL is not intercepted (we can tell this by looking at SSL certificates), so we know it is possible to send information through the internet, from school, without being spied on.
However, we will make sure that important sites do not become blocked - and, if anyone has suggestions about how the efficiency and usefulness of the blacklist can be improved, we will be happy to raise them on your behalf. An example of this would be the fact that sometimes youtube videos can be useful for lessons - I have seen an example of a teacher wishing to show one - since teachers are trusted, surely it would make sense to allow them to override the blacklist (although this is probably technically difficult).
[edit] DRM
As far as I am aware, the school does not use or promote DRM in any major way. (This is a good thing, as DRM is bad).
[edit] Open Document Formats
Support for ODF is being worked on. It has been added for a few weeks, but the support does not seem to be consistent. This issue has been raised with the IT technician, so hopefully will be resolved. Watch this space.
[edit] Software liberty
[edit] Freedomware used
Several pieces of freedomware are installed on all of the school computers:
- Firefox
- GIMP 2
- Inkscape
- Scribus
- Audacity
- MS Logo
- Notepad++
- Paint.net (MIT licensed except for some icons and text which are CC-BY-NC-ND)
- Tesseract OCR Backend
- PDF Creator
- Freemind
- NVU
- Truecrypt
- PostgreSQL
- Perl
- PHP
- OCS_Inventory
- GLPI
- ImageMagick
As concerns free operating systems, there are currently two Debian servers and Debian is now being dual booted on five machines in the Sixth Form COmmon Room. (Debian is a popular GNU/Linux distribution).
[edit] Proprietary software used and proposed alternatives
| Proprietary software | Freedomware Alternative | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Omnigraph
Autograph | Lybniz
KmPlot | |
| Sibeleus | ||
| Advancing Physics | Is really just a fronted to a database of information - but that information is locked away in a closed format. |
[edit] Open Media
Few, if any open media protocols are supported by the school computers. However, few media formats are supported as a whole, as there are very few videos that are needed to be watched at school. Nonetheless, we will ask about ogg support along with the requests for other open formats (ODF).
