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Re: [school-discuss] Free / Open Source on iPads?



Great idea, Laura. As usual, your research is helpful and you're thinking deeply. My current job is with a cool middle school that's married to (in my opinion) not so cool proprietary solutions including the ipad. Would love to see less commercial, freer options.  I wonder if there's any hope for an alternative culture of Android, or, better yet, linux device apps for schools to develop. It might be along the KDE community lines (or even within it)? There's a whole new set of school-needs ready to be addressed. I see your point that focusing on an existing large community is the way to reach more users.  Ok.  I get your point.  Not sure I like it, but I can't deny that you're right.  I'll steer any potential collaborators your way as I'm sure others will also.

On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:00 AM, LM <lmemsm@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, Dec 4, 2017 at 5:26 PM, David Bucknell <david.bucknell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> This is from 2012. The author writes persuasively about giving the ipad a
> try as a means of promoting free / open source alternatives -- despite its
> proprietary nature -- because of the number of people using it.
>
> Five years later, the same problem exists and is getting worse.  What's to
> be done?
> Comments?

Finally purchased a tablet.  I made sure to buy an Android device
instead of an Apple one because of the two, the Android is more open.
I think consumers need to vote for one they want with their purchases.

I am noticing more and more people with no computers and just phones
or tablets.  Was wondering how one of them ran a business if they
couldn't run any serious business software (just what was on their
tablet).

FOSS programs are available for Androids:
https://f-droid.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open-source_Android_applications

There's also a GNU project to create a fully free Android operating system:
https://www.replicant.us/


I've been thinking a lot lately about trying to port various Open
Source programs to Android.  However, documentation on the NDK and how
to create Android packages seems pretty poor.  Maybe the GNU project
or some FOSS documentation project or some other FOSS group would like
to tackle the problem of providing better information on ways to
build, port and package Free Android applications using Free tools.
Would love to discuss porting issues further, but don't know of anyone
to discuss this with.  If anyone has recommendations, let me know.
Thanks.
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--
David M. Bucknell
91-173 Ewa Beach Rd., Ewa Beach, HI 96706