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Free software in education will take a step back -- republicans are going after school board positions nationwide in the US (web.archive.org)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Since last year, republicans have launched a campaign to get conservatives on school boards. This is the political party in the US who favors privatization of everything. They are sympathetic to giant corporations and champion #citizensUnited (which elevates corporations above humans). #Ohio has a large number of extremists intending to take school board positions.

I don’t get the impression #FOSS orgs like #FSF are paying attention. The FOSS movement stands to lose some ground here. #FreeSoftware in education is important and FSF does not even have a campaign for it on their website.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This article is ancient. We have more recent elections to go off of.

And according to basically everything I can find, "Moms For Liberty" and related groups suffered major losses basically everywhere the last cycle.

I'm not at all suggesting to not worry, after all, it's worry that got us to ensure they didn't win. But I am suggesting that your information is very out of date and that you should do a better job of finding recent points to support your claim.

Also, I think this is off topic for this community and seems far more like political bait as some have pointed out.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

It's too bad you can't downvote posts on this community. It's almost as though it would be valuable to reduce the visibility of bait posts with eye-catching headlines

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

any evidence at all to even remotely suggest this will lead to an anti foss sentiment? or is this just yet more shoving political bait into foss?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I can anecdotally say that the more right-leaning people I know are the most anti-FOSS but I'm not sure that applies generally.

Even that comes with a caveat: the people I know disagree with it philosophically, i.e. they can't see how it can work for the maintainer and won't donate, yet are as happy as anyone to use something for free.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I disagree that American-right leaning people are anti foss. rather FOSS is great because it has zero political inclinations. Rather, as some who interacts with all sorts of people across the political spectrum, in fact most of my friends who are American-Right leaning or republicans, are the ones pushing hard for foss software, my American-left leaning friends are more generally neutral.

Rather, I think that in general, the more politically inclined someone is, regardless of political stance, the easier it is to convince them to be pro foss.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Nice to know, I was pretty sure my experience was purely anecdotal.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Me suspects the latter

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thats a stretch. You have any ya know sources on that or just pulling it out of your ass.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Source was included in OPs post, not sure of the reasoning behind putting it through the wayback machine, but to each their own. https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-elections-education-school-boards-teaching-059f2465829ab009394469b95c8cc94a There's a few more links within the article with other details.

The spreadsheet linked in the post is a bit weird but also has a lot of other interesting supporting details.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

#Apnews is Tor-hostile. I do not support excluding people so I shared a link that is open to the public and inclusive.

If AP News would have also blocked archive.org (thus public libraries) then I would not have shared the link at all — out of respect for #netneutrality (access equality).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

It's to avoid trackers and/or paywalls, and also to preserve it just in case. But yes, to each their own.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Usually people put links to sites they don't want to support in archive, so that the sites are deprived of traffic, leading to a reduction (albiet small) in ad revenue and possible paywall popups

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I was more interested in the blatent political attack that some conservatives hurt foss in education.