Re: [seul-edu] SEUL Licensing (was: Our presence at trade shows)

[Manuel Gutierrez Algaba <irmina@ctv.es>]

On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, Ray Olszewski wrote:
> Manuel -- Could you clarify this comment? I can't tell which of the
> following you mean:
> 
>         1. Educational software is so easy to write that "hackers"
>                 can write what we need quickly and easily, once we
>                 get them interested.

Yes, I didn't mean the last two lines but it is true. As Eric Raymond
points in 
"Gathering the Noosphere" or something like that,  hackers move 
by selfish principles. One of them is self-learning. Programming
some Java ftp server or debugging some gcc internal feature may
teach them ( or they believe that they may teach them). Graphics
(in general) is a usual interest for hackers, too.

> 
>         2. Educational software is uninteresting to "hackers" 
>                 because it poses no interesting challenges to
>                 their skills, so it will be difficult to get
>                 them interested.

Educational, as I see it, it's not very difficult, maybe it requires
a bit of artistic hand for drawings, but its foundations are the
same as normal education. And education bases, partly,
 in repetition and 
in masses of exercises, so no hacker is interesting in feeding
raw data, nor in "common" structuration. You can have a bit of
 Artificial Inteligence from time to time. 

That doesn't mean that a teacher with structuration capabilities
may do a nice app, like that one about chemicals combinations, I
forgot the name. 

But, yes, educational offers less technology to learn and less
fame ( inter pares, among equals) than, let's say, a Perl library
for whatever. 

The whole point of it, it's to do something light, reusable,
well and lightly structured and raw of data to produce lots 
of different exercises/effects. 

Regards/Saludos
Manolo
www.ctv.es/USERS/irmina    /TeEncontreX.html   /texpython.htm
/pyttex.htm /cruo/cruolinux.htm ICQ:77697936 (sirve el ICQ para algo?)

  QOTD: "I used to be lost in the shuffle, now I just shuffle along with the lost."