Re: SEUL: Various educational software stuff

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <363F40CD.653EA401@csrlink.net>, dloss@csrlink.net writes:
>Bill Stephenson sent this to me at my work account.  I'm copying it here
>with his permission.
>
>-------------------------
>
>Doug,
>
>This sounds great!
>
>I can set up a software links page for downloading educational apps that
>are
>released under GNU now if you like. If they are not to large I can host
>them
>at edos.org. I'll have to look around but I think I've seen a few at the
>perl sites I visit.

Even if they are 'too big', I can host them on belegost:
Filesystem         1024-blocks  Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hdc1            2970000 1873819  1096181     63%   /mirror
/dev/hdc3            3077423 1849409  1068853     63%   /extra

Bill: how is your connectivity at edos.org? Any bandwidth/space/etc
limitations? Also, if you give me a list of (very specific) projects
you want volunteers for, I can add them to the seul todo list
(http://www.seul.org/what/todo.html).

>I would like know if It would be worth while to try and schedule a sort
>of
>conference here. I am sure I can arrange some deeply discounted rooms
>and
>free show and attraction tickets for those who attend. (I'll try and get
>rooms for free ;) We should be able to use the Reeds Springs Vo-Tech for
>workshops.

This I can't answer. I don't know how the educational 'real world' works,
in terms of conferences and such. You might try contacting esr
(esr@thyrsus.com) about it. He's pretty busy these days, but this might
be something he's interested in. I would recommend waiting until you've
made a bit more progress before considering that, though.

>And now for another of my thoughts on this project. What if you go to
>commercial sponsors for $$ to fund development and support of this
>software.
>This is my thinking, you sell the "Splash" screen of a given app to the
>corporation that funds it.  This could be done on a yearly basis. 

That sounds like it could be reasonable. But I don't know much about
advertising, either. :)

>There are obvious drawbacks to the above and much that would need to be
>worked out for this to implemented. I offer it for discussion. 

If it truly is free software (GPL'ed), then I think it would be great
to do it. It's true that it's not the most ideal solution, but it's
pretty close, at least as a first step. Free software is about the
freedom to do what you want with/to the software. The fact that you
distribute the program along with a 'credits' file, or you distribute it
configured to display the credits file upon boot, is quite reasonable.
Of course, you can't distribute it with any restrictions like "you
can't modify the software to remove the splash screen". Maybe that would
be a tricky point for companies...it would be a good-faith effort on
both sides.

Btw, Bill: are you on seul-pub, or reading the archives? Otherwise
you're probably missing many of the posts..

--Roger