Re: [seul-edu] free software / open source

[Bill <selinux@home.com>]

On Tuesday 18 December 2001 15:06, you wrote:
> As advocates for open computing in schools, we must not descend
> into counterproductive licensing wars on this list. As end users,
> rather than programmers, the vast majority of educational users
> will never be affected by the strictures of these licenses, knowing
> only their benefits. If our first obligation is to education, we
> should remain scrupulously agnostic on the various licenses, and
> their inclusion in our mission. If it's free or open sourced, it
> should be within our ambit, provided its license meets either the
> Free or Open Source definition.
>
>
> --William Abernathy
>

Thank you, William. My earlier post defined all of these terms as 
"moot". While we are disputing finely shaved gradations of semantic 
meaning, Microsoft is making a sales pitch to the very schools where 
we are hoping to place Linux.

This dispute has all the hallmarks of being simply a means for 
avoiding action.

While this little tempest in a teapot was raging, about a dozen 
people from my local LUG have gotten together to develop a 
series of local educational projects. We have obtained hardware for a 
pilot program, a room with internet access to meet in at a local 
school and the services of 3 individuals who have been installing 
Linux in local parochial schools. We have the IT admin and an 
instructor and two students from that school district in that group. 
That's just 4 days worth of work. It appears our first project will 
take the form of a sponsored extra-curricular activity on Saturday 
afternoons in an all-Linux networked environment and that we will 
likely (not nailed down yet) offer training to students along 3 
different tracks: system administration, application user, program 
development. We will meet in about a week for a little face time, 
some coffee and to coordinate responsibilities.

I just mention this because there is no (good) reason why the MSFT 
market share should ever again increase ... unless we spend our time 
bickering over trifling matters while letting the larger ones go 
neglected.

Folks, the web site is nice and the mailing list is probably 
essential. But all of it is empty unless there is action ... and lots 
of it ... to go with all the fine words. If you are a hotshot with 
words, get together with others and start hammering out a curriculum 
for each grade level with the goal of turning out programmers, RHCE's 
(at least) and fully qualified application users at the end point in 
the instruction. There is a LOT of training material that needs to be 
written and tested and re-written and re-tested until there is a body 
of work we can just toss on a desk and say "There it is. It works. 
Use it." We can't afford to let ourselves get sidetracked into empty 
discussions ... we haven't the time to spare. 

Bill
-- 
         total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:   1545352     966196     579156          0     296520     409372
Swap:   401584       7808     393776
Total: 1946936     974004     972932
Linux a.genesis.com 2.4.14 #3 Fri Nov 9 23:14:31 EST 2001 K7 750MHz
7:52am  up 1 day, 23:27,  2 users,  load average: 0.06, 0.03, 0.01