Re: General advice beyond Org

[Aaron Ecay <aaronecay@gmail.com>]

Hi Edgar,

2018ko maiatzak 18an, -ek idatzi zuen:

> It is only when we have to collaborate directly that the issue
> arises. 

It sounds like the issue you are having is about collaboration workflow,
and not about the usage of free software per se.  Reading between the
lines, it sounds like your biggest difficulty is with Microsoft Word.
Itʼs very unlikely that you will be able to convince your advisor to
switch to another program when writing with you.  As Diego said, it is
ultimately up to you whether you can live with this.  But there are
certainly compromises you could entertain that might make it easier.

There are important benefits, to a field and to individual researchers,
of open analyses.  On the other hand, what maters about a scientific
publication is principally the words themselves and where they are
published – not the workflow that was used to create them, which mostly
passes into irrelevance once they become part of the scientific record.
So you might find pragmatic benefits to focusing on free software
analysis tools and programming languages, and on the importance of
publicly releasing analysis materials (whether based on free software or
not) at an appropriate stage of the research, rather than on document
authorship workflow where your advisor seems to have a particularly
entrenched position.

Another suggestion to reach out to other graduate students, who have the
surplus of time* and lack of pre-established workflow habits conducive to
learning new techniques.  This wonʼt directly solve your issues with
your advisor, but if you are contributing to the success of free
software in other areas you might feel like your sacrifices with her are
being balanced out.

(*Having been a graduate student, Iʼm only too aware of the falsity of
the premise that grad students have ample free time in an absolute
sense.  But relative to other career stages, grad students are probably
the best situated in that regard.  Itʼs also true that there are many
things that grad students need to learn that could be learned either
with free or nonfree software.  The marginal time cost of replacing
nonfree software in that learning with free software is likely to be
small.)

Itʼs also true that free software has network effects.  Once someone is
using R or Python, they are introduced to things like Jupyter or knitr
(which are literate programming systems) – or even org mode.  They also
get exposed to VCS (like git), free text editors (like emacs, or RStudio),
and other tools that do not directly replace Word but contribute to an
alternate ecosystem.  They might eventually be induced to switch their
writing software of choice because of the features of such environments.
So by evangelizing the pieces of free software that are most appetizing
to others in your field, you are laying the groundwork for subsequent
improvements that might initially be a harder sell.

Finally, a very pragmatic suggestion.  You might suggest to your advisor
that you and her collaborate via Google Docs rather than MS Word.  This
is something I have found helpful with colleagues of mine who are not
otherwise prepared to change their writing habits.  The Google Docs
interface is very similar to Word (but actually avoids some of the
radical UI changes that MS has made recently, which might make it even
more appetizing to certain users).  While Gdocs is not free software (as
itʼs important to point out), it enables me to use less proprietary
software, on average.  Iʼve never been able to get Libreoffice to work
satisfactorily for iterative edits to a Word doc; I find that it too
often loses formatting, included images, or otherwise doesnʼt
interoperate with Word well enough.  So in the absence of Google Docs I
would have to maintain a Windows system on which to use Word.  With
Gdocs I have one browser tab that runs unfree JS, but the rest of my
system is GNU/Linux.  (There are also benefits to the online-first
nature of Google Docs, which avoids the emailing back and forth of
dueling versions of a Word document that I have sometimes encountered in
groups that primarily use Word – but these are orthogonal to the
free/nonfree distinction.)

I hope that some of this comes as useful advice.

-- 
Aaron Ecay