Free As in "Free Beer"

Recent student protests in Zagreb and Belgrade put forth the same proposition; free higher education. Not free as in freedom, as I hoped, but free as in “free beer”. Although I support the students in their protest against the society that has turned everything upside-down, I feel that there is a lack of something in students’ demands, and that has to do something with this “free as in freedom” thing that Richard M. Stallman coined for Free Software Foundation and “free as in free beer”, where the student requests mostly ended up. I do not intend to make some logical common ground between the Free Software Foundation and student protests in capitals of Croatia and Serbia, but there is a striking similarity between what happened with development of GNU (GNU’s not UNIX) as a entirely “free as in freedom” computer operating system and with the rise of Linux, as something that is similar, but not entirely what it was supposed to be, and closer to “free as in free beer” or better to say “free as in one free beer”. The level of freedom that Richard Stallman envisioned for GNU exceeds the level of freedom intended for Linux by Linus Torvalds many, many times. Due to the need to dumb the concept down to the level where it would be understood by all programmers as something viable, it was necessary to take the latter path. The whole story of GNU and Linux is explained HERE.

The demands for free education by University of Belgrade and University of Zagreb students equally stressed the fallacies of Bologna Declaration and standardization of higher education at the European level. This is true in my opinion. Recent student protests in Germany showed the same problem of turning higher education in something more similar to trade schools, trying to enroll as many students as possible to cover the expenses. But this is a question of quality, raised by Germans. The question raised by students in Balkans is the one of quantity - something where the idea of a free and open operating system is replaced by an idea of something that is supposed to run free of charge, as a combination of free and proprietary, released under various licenses, just enough to keep it running. It is a question of quantity and dispersion, rather than quality and integration. The expressed desire here is to have a free operating system of higher education that will use a very proprietary Bologna Declaration as a framework for duration of study and formal study requirements, where there will be a constant need to push students through college in order to satisfy the statistic of the “society of knowledge” paradigm – which is very corporate and proprietary in the core, connecting European higher education to corporate needs.

There is also a very obvious credentialist tendency present here, with the expressed student demand to lower the threshold for entry in graduate studies and to get master’s degrees in the undergraduate cycle of study, which initiated the student protests in Serbia a year ago. Now, this has nothing to do with free education! This is a very open abuse of the philosophy behind the free operating system of higher education. Using images from the past in mediating the reminders (mediated reminder!) from the 1968 student protests through Che Guevara t-shirts and anarchist symbolism, is the same misconception as thinking that you’re one step closer to freedom when using some of the latest Linux distributions with non-free software included. These are dead reminders, because they don't remind anyone of the essence of 1968 student struggle for humanized higher education in the world. The request should then be “education at a lower cost”, not “free education”. Czech Republic has good higher education at a low cost. If we are talking about the freedom, we are talking about the free operating system in its entirety. If you want to be free from the commercialization, refuse the Bologna Process as a process of commercialization! But how will it be possible to finish school earlier, with less work, with continuous testing and without integral oral exams after the course, and get into graduate school immediately? It will not. How will it be possible to shut up the teaching assistant, lecturer or professor with sheer ignorance, lack of interest for reading and that mean and silent threat of teacher evaluation? It will not be possible! The free operating system is free in its entirety and the teacher is free as well.

C.D. Broad said it best:

"It is to be feared that Spinoza would not have been enlightened enough to appreciate the beneficent system of the Ph.D. degree, introduced into English universities as a measure of post-war propaganda, whereby the time and energy of those who are qualified to do research are expended in supervising the work of those who never will be."