Re: Major interview

[Hilaire Fernandes <hilaire@seul.org>]

Hi Doug,


This interview is a good chance. I hope that in this occasion you will
tell how the philisophic aspect of GNU apply very well to the school
system.

It brings :

. freedom to share the softwares with our students - and they do
want. Here the idea of share can be sharing a tool who give you some
knowledges. For exemple, when I share Dr Geo with my students I share
a tool to help them in geometry.

. egality of access to the knowledge between students in different
schools - I mean all over the world. Because it's free and open. Again
with Dr Geo, one of the first thing I've done when porting it to
GNU/Linux is to inter-nationalize it : now if a school in Colombia
wants to use it one just need to translate the message file in
spanish. This ability of GNU/Linux to be multilanguage without system
change is a fantastic goodness.

In this interview, Doug, I hope you will explain to the developpers of
the GNU/Linux community that we are in urgent need of application, not
necessery education oriented but kid oriented as underline Trevor &
Ellen Witt about Claris for kids & Kid Pix Deluxe.  The GNU/Linux
system is now quite advanced and mature in the server side but in the
desktop and education use we are only at the begining of the
adventure.

To help developper to start you can :

. point them to the project on Seul/Edu. Actually, I don't think it's
easy to start on an already started project

. point them on a list of wish application. I will list some there :

1. An application like Microsoft Publisher. At least in France, this
   application is widly used by school (primary and secondary) running
   a school newspaper. It's more easy to use than a wordprocessor like
   WP8. The kids enter the text on a simple text editor, next they
   prepare the frames on Publisher and paste the text on it. As
   Koffice is natively frame based, we could ask to the Koffice team
   if they can help. Comment ?

2. A Data base application for school library with a web front end. A
   browser like lynx should be enougth so we can used i386. Georges
   can you tell us more about such a project in France ?


In this interview, I hope you will not pray edusoft company to port
their softares :

1. you don't need to! Basicly if there is money to make porting edu
   software to GNU/Linux, company will do so. Actually this is not the
   case, so don't use electron on this.

2. the more proprietary edusoft we will have the less freedom we will
   have. And this will apply a negate effect of the goodness cited at
   the beginning of this message.

3. more important, it will not be appropriate to adress such a
   message  and asking to the GNU/Linux community doing an effort developping edu
   oriented application in the same time.



Hilaire

-- 
Hilaire Fernandes 
Home page http://cran.mit.edu/~hilaire
Dr Geo project http://www.drgeo.seul.org