Remote education: My children's freedom and privacy at stake
"During COVID-19 confinement, I saw how all teachers were choosing proprietary video conferencing programs over free software for the continuation of online lessons. I had two options: do nothing about it and let proprietary video conferencing tools spread among my children and their classmates, or try to fight back against this injustice."
Original story by LibrePlanet 2021 and the Free Software Foundation. Published 2020-03-21, Originally published 2020-03-21.
This work is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
Video Copyright LibrePlanet 2021 / Free Software Foundation. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
"My paramount concern was for my own children. I knew in advance what it meant to start this battle. Moreover, this could affect my children’s feelings. They were not attending school and they were already facing a very complex challenge by being forced to stay at home. On the other hand, I was also afraid of having some kind of retaliation from their teachers against them because of my fight.
I didn’t want any of these things to happen. I needed to decide what to do, and evaluate if my commitment towards the free software movement was more important than my own children, or if I had to let it go this time. I concluded that the answer was not either face a big fight or do nothing, I could do something in between; that at least would be better than doing nothing."
"Javier Sepúlveda is the founder and executive director of VALENCIATECH, which runs GNU/Linux servers using free software exclusively. He was a professor of computer science for over ten years, and has worked as a programmer, systems administrator, and consultant. He donates his time to the GNU Project, the Free Software Foundation, and the Asociación de Usuarios de GNU/Linux de Valencia. He lives in Valencia (Spain) with his wife and two children."
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