[Assist] Personal advice

[Megver83]

El 17/05/18 a las 20:41, edgar at openmail.cc escribió:
> Hello,
> 
> _I_ need help. I am in graduate school, and I keep having issues with my
> advisor for my strong inclination to use free software. I am obviously
> not in position to refuse, but she dislikes to have discussions about
> it. She pays a stipend to me every month, and my tuition is waved.

When I was at school, I also had that problem. Now I'm having
home-school, so bye bye mandatory proprietary software :)

(I know that not everyone might be a self-taught person like me, but
it's a viable option)

> 
> Is anyone here aware of a place where they do computational human
> biomechanics, mechanics, materials, finite elements or programming in
> general where I could interact with free software? (having github,
> LaTeX, Python, etc., possibly Emacs and Org-mode; avoid Micro$oft
> products, Matlab, Mathematica, etc.). Is there no place where one can
> simply use free software on a daily basis?
> 
> It seems from her comments that I am, otherwise, a good researcher. She
> is a nice person, but I fear that this may become an issue in the future
> for me (whether with her or other people).
> 
> As a student or junior faculty, how do you go about this? Do you just
> nod and wave your freedom good bye?

Right, so it seems you definitively want to get rid of non-free stuff,
which is a good initiative that few people have. At school, I
recommended some of my teachers to use the same free software tools
which I used at GNU/Linux, but in their case on Windows/Mac (this tools
are multiplatform), like LibreOffice.

Now, it seems that your problem is much more complex than the one I had,
but you can do an effort to look for good free software replacements of
the programs you're told to use.

Note that, however, sometimes it may happen that there's no free
replacement (or not a useful one at least), and that's the worst
situation. In such case, unless you reverse-engineer those programs or
create a replacement yourself, you've no other option than running those
under an emulator/VM/container.

-- 
~Megver83

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