RfD: FSFe-education [FSFE projects]

[Simo Sorce]

"Lord Alistair Davidson, part time deity" wrote:
> 
> Olivier Berger wrote:
> >
> > This solves the problem of  system adminsitration, but not of the
> > educational applications, that teachers and students really need.
> 
> Well, at my sister's school they currently have a WinNT server with
> Win98 on all the boxes. They use MS Office for most things, and Visual
> BASIC for teaching programming. I believe the art and music departments
> have specialist programs too.
> 
> Now, getting GNU/Linux on to the servers shouldn't be hard. The
> engineers who were setting them up wanted to use GNU/Linux, but the
> council told them to use WinNT instead (this is hearsay, but I believe
> it to be true).

Managers... :(

> The trouble after that is the desktop. There is a very powerful argument
> that says that the students should be learning to use Windows, because
> that's waht most of them will use at work.

Easy argument, when students will finish school, there will be another version
of windows and office, so it's better to understand concepts instead,
informatics evolve too fast anyway.
 
> However, if we can overcome that then it's easy-ish. IIRC Star Office is
> libre, so that can easily replace MS Office. The Gimp is as good as any
> other art software out there. I don't know what GNU/Linux has in the way
> of music software, though. There's a number of options for programming.
> There's a project right now to make a VB-alike called K-BASIC. There's
> the GCC of course, but it doesn't have pretty pictures like VB. Borland
> are porting (have ported?) Delphi, but that's not Free itself AFAIK.

I've seen a demo ok kylix (delphi for linux) and it's easy, but there are scripting
language as python that are very good.
I think schools should not teach things like VB or Kylix, these languages hides
too much, bad programing/programmers are the results.

> A GNU/Linux + Star Office + the Gimp + [programming language] + [some
> Free music program] would be a lot cheaper than a comparable
> windows-based system. Considering how cash-strapped schools are in many
> places, selling that to them shouldn't be hard.

Not only they will be chaep, but users will be free to have the same setup at
home without spending many many many euros, many students will have less money
than a school.
Calculate the price (of software) for the single system (without mass discount)
and see if a student can have it's own.

Do not forget freedom.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce
----------
Linux IS user friendly, it is just selective about who his friends are.