Re: Re: [school-discuss] Britannica

[jkinz@ultranet.com]

On Tue, May 28, 2002 at 03:52:35PM -0700, tom poe wrote:
> 
> Karl:  Calm down.  This is not about rejecting Brittanica.  This is about 

Karl didn't seem upset to me even if I don't agree with everything
he said.  Telling people who aren't upset to calm down might cause
a problem where none exists.  Are you sure he was flaming ?

As I recall the core issue here is that some schools won't consider
using open source based tools unless E. Britannica runs on them.

For those schools we have to enable E. Britannica on Linux or write
our own Open Source equivalent of the E. Britannica.  This is clearly a
non-trivial effort that would take years.  Of course the Open Source
community has already demonstrated its ability to dedicate itself to
large projects. However this does not seem a project likely to occur. :-)

Since EB, as noted below, is written in Java, most of it probably
already runs on Linux.  This means that the remaining barrier to having
EB available on LINUX is the question of how EB can insure that they
will garner enough revenue from Linux sales of the product to pay for
Linux-capable tech support staffers to answers phones and help Linux
based customers when they encounter probs.  This is sort of a chicken
versus egg problem.  No Linux schools -EB wont sell EB on Linux.
"No EB on Linux ? We won't put Linux in our school."

For any vendor, marketing even an existing product on a new platform is
a much more complex question than just porting it to that new platform.

> Brittanica "using" free programmers to build a proprietary version of 
> software.  If Brittanica is written in Java, it is portable already to 
> Unix/linux.  That's the nature of the programming language.  If they want to 
> "port" it to linux, all they have to do is run the "package" code.  Since 
> they don't, there's really nothing anyone can do to help them.  Now, as to 
> ideology, just what is it about Brittanica that is causing you so much pain?  
> Are children suffering because there is no way to access particular 
> information?  I suspect the BETTER tool/app that is open source is already 
> out there.  It's called the Internet.  And, a class that wants to access the 
> Internet and gather reliable, accurate, up-to-the-minute encyclopedic 
> information can do no better than to collectively report their findings and 
> share their discoveries with their classmates.  Heck of a lot cheaper, too.

I agree here Tom.  Sadly the schools who are making using Linux
conditional on the availability of EB don't.  Constructively - How do
we convince them ?
Jeff Kinz


> Thanks,
> Tom Poe
> Reno, NV
> http://www.studioforrecording.org/
> http://www.ibiblio.org/studioforrecording/
> http://renotahoe.pm.org/ 
>